Francisco Goldman’s The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle is a memoir that blends personal grief, travel writing, journalism, and political commentary. Part travelogue and part reportage on Mexican politics and narco-violence, the book follows Goldman several years after the tragic death of his wife, the writer Aura Estrada, as he attempts to rebuild his life in the city they both loved. The result is both a deeply personal account of a widower learning to live with loss and an insightful exploration of Mexico City’s beauty, complexity, and political realities. The Interior Circuit examines how individuals and nations live with trauma, how stories become embedded in places, and how cities can shape personal identity. In confronting both personal and national grief, The Interior Circuit reveals the enduring human struggle to find meaning after loss.
At the heart of the memoir is Goldman’s struggle with grief. Five years after Aura’s tragic death in a swimming accident, he finds himself overwhelmed by a renewed intensity of mourning. He reflects that “every year, it has seemed to me, grief changes, persisting in shape-shifting ways that, as the years go by, become more furtive.”
Yet as the fifth anniversary of Aura’s death approaches, he experiences grief in a new way:
“The intensity of my grief was resurgent, weighting on me in a new and at times even somewhat frightening way that I didn’t know how to free myself.”
Rather than fading with time, grief transforms, becoming an enduring presence that continually reshapes itself.
Goldman becomes convinced that his relationship with Mexico City is somehow connected to his ability to endure and understand his loss. He writes:
“I felt that there was a problem or riddle I had to solve and that somehow Mexico City or something in my relationship to the city held a solution.”
This idea drives much of the narrative. Although he occasionally considers leaving the city to escape the memories attached to Aura, he ultimately rejects that possibility.
“Sometimes I told myself that one logical step would be to leave the city, one free of memories and associations with Aura,” he admits, but leaving remains “an inconceivable step.” Instead, he decides that “maybe the solution lay in staying but going further in, embracing with more force… to find a way to live in Mexico City without Aura.”
Mexico City occupies a unique position in Goldman’s emotional landscape. It was Aura’s city, the place where she grew up, where she died, and where her ashes remain. It also became home for Goldman in a way no other place ever had. His grief often takes the form of a ritualistic exploration of the city, particularly the streets and neighbourhoods associated with Aura’s childhood. The city itself appears almost mysterious, governed by an order that even lifelong residents can only dimly perceive. Goldman wanders through noir-like streets filled with shadows, history, and memory, searching for meaning amid loss.
The memoir is also a love letter to Mexico City. Goldman vividly captures its energy, diversity, neighbourhoods, bars, politics, culture, and contradictions. The city emerges not merely as a setting but as a living character whose complexity mirrors the author’s emotional journey. Reflecting on his early years there, Goldman recalls:
“During my first years of living in Mexico City, I was under the spell of the commonplace that the city was uniquely surreal and that this surrealism was the key to grasping the city’s personality, its truth. I used to set out on long walks determined not to turn back until I’d witnessed or discovered something that expressed that surrealism.”
The city is presented as a place shaped by history and migration. Goldman notes how, in the 1920s and 1930s, many Eastern European Jewish immigrants settled in the Condesa neighbourhood, and that traces of old Central European cafés still remained in the early 1990s. He emphasises that Mexico City differs from much of the country because of its cosmopolitan character, influenced by immigrants and dozens of ethnic and national communities. The city even reflects its intellectual culture through streets named after writers and philosophers such as Tolstoy, Homer, and Schiller.
Literature permeates Goldman’s account of the city. References to Efraín Huerta, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, Roberto Bolaño, Halldór Laxness, and Gabriel García Márquez help situate his experiences within a broader literary tradition. In particular, Bolaño’s depictions of 1970s Mexico City often resemble Goldman’s own experiences of the city during the 1990s and 2000s. Goldman moves through a world populated by painters, journalists, and artists, spending long afternoons talking, wandering neighbourhoods, and observing urban life.
As the narrative develops, Goldman widens his focus to examine contemporary Mexico and the violence that has scarred the country. His personal grief gradually becomes a metaphor for national grief. He explores kidnappings, femicides in Ciudad Juárez, murders of journalists, disappearances, organised crime, and government corruption. He writes movingly about a society filled with people carrying hidden trauma:
“The people going about their days and nights carrying the often silently riotous inner atmosphere of traumatic grief have by now filled much of Mexico (…) with an army of exhausted, lonely ghosts. They give pertinent new meaning to Bolaño’s phrase about Latin America being a giant manicomio, a lunatic asylum. Little by little the ghosts may again be reconciled to life, in some cases they will even thrive, but many never will.”
This connection between private and collective mourning becomes especially clear in Goldman’s investigation of the 2013 “Heavens Case,” in which twelve young people from Tepito were kidnapped and later brutally murdered in connection to organised crime. Goldman repeatedly visits Tepito, a neighbourhood often associated with violence but also with resilience and strong community ties. Seeking to understand the suffering of the victims’ families, he asks:
“What is it like, what has it been like, for the Tepito families, as they ponder the fates of their missing? What are they going through, when they wake at three in the morning?”
He recognises in their suffering something familiar from his own experience of bereavement.
When speaking with relatives of the disappeared, Goldman feels surrounded by a grief that resembles his own: a “murky, exhausted locked-up inside grief.” He recalls Iris Murdoch’s observation:
“The bereaved have no language with which to speak to the unbereaved.”
Throughout the book, he returns to the difficulty of expressing loss and the loneliness of mourning. Many residents of Tepito live in circumstances where the boundary between legality and illegality is blurred, and where fear prevents people from speaking openly because organised crime and police corruption are often intertwined.
Goldman’s reflections on grief are closely linked to his experiences of movement through the city. Five years after Aura’s death, he decides to learn how to drive in Mexico City. What appears at first to be a practical challenge gradually becomes a powerful metaphor. As he navigates the city’s vast road network, particularly the Circuito Interior, he is also learning how to navigate grief and regain a sense of direction in his life. The roads become symbolic of the emotional pathways he must travel in order to continue living.
Throughout the memoir, Aura remains a constant presence. Goldman recalls stories she told him, including her habit of walking alone before dawn along the Paseo de la Reforma and sitting on the steps of the Angel of Independence.
“Whenever I’m on the Paseo de la Reforma, I remember a story Aura told me about herself (…) I used to wish I could have been there with her, walking on the Paseo, sitting on the steps of El Ángel as the darkness lifted.”
Such moments demonstrate how memory inhabits places and how cities become repositories of personal histories.
One of the most striking aspects of the memoir is Goldman’s comparison between mourning in Mexico City and mourning in New York. In Mexico City, he never felt pressured to hide his grief. People continued inviting him to social gatherings and did not insist that he should “move on.” Aura’s memory remained welcome in conversation. This acceptance allowed him to carry his grief openly rather than treating it as something embarrassing or burdensome. He even wonders whether he will spend the rest of his life carrying his late wife’s books and possessions from place to place, a physical reminder of the permanence of memory.
By the end of the memoir, Goldman has not overcome grief, but he has learned to live alongside it. Aura remains a permanent part of him. There are still moments when he is overtaken by the reality of her absence, yet he experiences her loss “with less resistance, less corrosively, with less inner panic than before.” The book suggests that grief is not something to be conquered but something to be integrated into one’s life.
Ultimately, The Interior Circuit explores the meaning of home, belonging, memory, and mourning. Through its combination of memoir, travel writing, journalism, and cultural criticism, the book becomes both a love letter to Mexico City and a tribute to Aura Estrada. As Goldman observes:
“The consciousness of mortality is the most important truth we can engrave within ourselves in order to be able to live life to its fullest.”
