I'm Still Here

Overview

I’m Still Here (Portuguese: Ainda Estou Aqui) is a 2015 memoir by Brazilian writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva. It recounts the history of his family under Brazil’s military dictatorship, focusing on the disappearance of his father, Rubens Paiva, and the life his mother, Eunice, built in its aftermath. The book is personal testimony as well as a work of historical remembrance: rather than approaching political repression only through institutions or public events, it shows how state violence enters a home and reshapes the lives of those left behind.

Rubens Paiva, an engineer and former congressman, was arrested by military police on January 20, 1971, and never returned home. For his family, his disappearance meant years of uncertainty about what had happened to him. It became clear only decades later that he had been tortured and murdered by the dictatorship. The memoir follows the consequences of that absence for Eunice and their five children. Eunice had to care for her family while confronting the loss of her husband and pursuing answers. She later became a prominent human-rights lawyer and activist, devoting much of her work to justice and Indigenous rights. The account therefore concerns both a family’s grief and a woman’s transformation into a public advocate.

Background and themes

Paiva began writing the memoir as his mother, then in her eighties, was living with Alzheimer’s disease. After more than a decade with the illness, she was losing memories of her past, including her work as a lawyer and activist. Paiva wanted to preserve his family’s history while he still could, recording not only what had happened to his father but also who his mother had been and what she had done. This circumstance gives the book a second, intimate strand: alongside the political disappearance is the gradual fading of personal memory. Writing becomes a way to hold on to a life and a history that illness threatens to make inaccessible.

The memoir’s central themes include authoritarian violence, forced disappearance, memory, grief, family responsibility, resilience, and the pursuit of justice. Its perspective is grounded in the ordinary consequences of a public crime: a missing parent, a family forced to adapt, and a mother who must continue living amid fear and unanswered questions. Eunice is not presented only through loss. Her capacity to act, care for her children, and sustain a commitment to justice is essential to the story. The title can be read as an affirmation of continued presence and survival, and as a statement of the book’s own purpose: to keep people and experiences in public memory.

Reception and significance

I’m Still Here is an important work in Paiva’s writing on family history and Brazil’s dictatorship. It links an individual testimony to a wider history of repression, showing why the consequences of forced disappearance endure long after the initial violence. The memoir also reached a much larger international audience through Walter Salles’s 2024 film adaptation, which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2025. The film’s success renewed attention to the book and to Eunice Paiva’s life. The memoir’s lasting significance, however, rests on its own achievement: it preserves a family’s account of loss and perseverance, and makes historical memory inseparable from the lives of the people who carry it.