A wealthy woman in a 1960s Rio penthouse opens her maid's wardrobe, finds a cockroach, crushes it and puts a piece of it in her mouth. That scene from The Passion According to G.H. is the starting point for this deep dive into Clarice Lispector, born Chaya in a Ukrainian village in 1920 amid pogroms that left her mother paralyzed. We follow the family's flight through Romania and Hamburg to the Brazilian Northeast, the immediate renaming that turned Chaya into Clarice, the poverty of Maceió and Recife, and the death of her mother when she was nine.

We trace her drive to become fully Brazilian, from law school and journalism to citizenship at 21 and, in the same year, the debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, which critics wrongly assumed imitated Joyce and Woolf, writers she had not yet read. Then the diplomatic years abroad with Maury Gurgel ...