20/09/2026
TOMORROW IS THE DAY! 🎉 If you’re still on the fence, consider Vice Chair Edicio dela
Torre’s praise for Difficult!
To read the chapters of Difficult is to walk through a gallery of portraits of Etta Rosales, set
against the shifting backdrops of her life and times, each rendered in an expressionist style.
The stories are brush strokes, layer upon layer, painting the lines, shapes, and colors of Etta.
There are contrasting highlights and shadows, of the difficult challenges she met, the difficult
choices she made, and the consequences she lived with and lived through.
When Melay Abao proposed Difficult as the book title, Etta was not, at first, drawn to it. She
felt that it may not give enough credit to her own agency, her own hand in shaping her story.
Happily, she eventually agreed. Because “difficult” says something truer, that Etta is hard to
categorize. She cannot be reduced to any either-or category—resistance activist or human
rights reformist, radical or stateswoman, political or personal. She is not one or the other. She is
both, and more, and neither fully.
The book represents an old philosophical insight—individuum est ineffabile—the person as
ultimately beyond the reach of general categories we use in order to know. To say that Etta is
irreducible to any single type, or combination of types, is to recognize her freedom, her
self-determination, her dignity. Read this way, calling her “difficult” is an act of respect.
Etta's story is, at its heart, a feminist one, and Difficult is feminist writing in the fullest sense. It
insists on wholeness over binary, on a person who cannot be split into resistance or reform,
public or private. It holds her whole, difficult, undivided, herself.
—Edicio dela Torre, Vice Chair of Bantayog ng mga Bayani Foundation and one of the
founders of the Movement for Popular Democracy (MPD)
Set your alarms—Difficult launches in Ateneo de Manila University in less than 24 hours! 🦅
