I recently finished Tulip Skin by Laura Sánchez, and it was exceptional.

What resonated with me most was not just the resilience woven throughout the autobiography, but the way she wrote motherhood, birth, and survival with such artesanal softness and brutal honesty.

As she worked through the moments surrounding both of her children’s births, I found myself filled with an immense amount of envy. The moment of having your baby immediately placed on your chest was never something I was able to experience with either of the children I gave birth to. Both of my births were followed by separation, urgency, NICU monitors, and medical intervention.

Another element that added profoundly to the experience of Tulip Skin was the immersion into art beyond the written narrative itself. Throughout the book, Laura Sánchez weaves music into the memoir through scannable barcodes, allowing the reader to step more fully into the emotional atmosphere surrounding particular moments and illustrations.

This deepened the intimacy of the work. The music created emotional architecture around the illustrations, drawing out grief, tenderness, nostalgia, and longing in a way that words alone sometimes cannot express. At certain points, it felt less like reading a memoir and more like being invited carefully into someone’s interior world.

The pairing of visual art, music, and prose made many moments feel almost suspended in time. The illustrations already carried immense emotional weight, but the added musical immersion amplified the emotional resonance, provoking emotions and memories that lingered long after each chapter ended.

There is a passage where she writes about singing “You Are My Sunshine” while her daughter was in the NICU. She describes becoming overwhelmed with emotion every time she reached the line:

“Please don’t take my sunshine away.”

That passage elicited a deep sorrow within me.

It brought me back to the firm recliner every NICU room seems to have, sitting as close to the incubator as physically possible, singing that exact song with my breath shaking every single time I reached that line.

Something about those words never felt like lyrics in the NICU.

They felt like a prayer. A plea. A desperate request to keep my baby safe.

I also deeply loved her reference to “Holland,” a metaphor many disability and medically complex families know well. Not because it romanticizes hardship, but because it captures the disorientation of grieving the life you expected while slowly learning to navigate — and even love — the one you were given instead.

Her references to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs became an interesting actualization within the memoir itself. So much of life in and after the NICU collapses your world down to the most fundamental levels of human need:

safety, survival, sleep, breathing, stability, keeping your child alive.

Higher concepts like identity, creativity, emotional processing, and self-actualization often become secondary to simply enduring.

As the memoir unfolded, it felt as though it was slowly climbing back upward through those layers — from survival into meaning, art, connection, identity, and healing. It mirrored something many caregivers and medically complex families experience but rarely articulate aloud.

This book made me reflect on the many ways people survive: emotionally, artistically, practically, and quietly. It reminded me that resilience does not always look strong. Sometimes it looks like singing softly beside an incubator while trying not to fall apart.

Further Reading:

Works that help give language to the spaces medicine alone cannot fully explain.

• Tulip Skin — Laura Sánchez
• “Welcome to Holland” — Emily Perl Kingsley