This is a review of García Márquez's memoir, Vivir para contarla. Mujica states: "The book functions as a kind of guide to works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Love in the Time of Cholera, illuminating material familiar to readers and placing it in its real-life context. Vivir para contarla covers approximately the first thirty years of the author's life, the formative period that stretches from his birth until the mid-1950s."