Oscar Hijuelos, the first Latino author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1989 novel “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” has written a memoir called “Thoughts Without Cigarettes.” In it, he turns his considerable storytelling talents inward, to recount in detail the experiences that shaped him as a novelist and a human being.

Memoirs are, by their definition, somewhat self-indulgent, but Hijuelos’ autobiography seems more like the culmination of a laborious and life-long process than mere self-gratification. It’s the final necessary piece in his reconciliation with his own Cuban heritage.

Growing up in Manhattan in the ‘50s and ‘60s as the son of impoverished, Cuban immigrants, Hijuelos’ childhood was a difficult one.  As a fair-skinned kid in an otherwise swarthy Latin family, he struggled with his “Cubaness” from the beginning.  At the age of five, after a visit with relatives in Cuba, he was stricken with a serious kidney disease, which left him hospitalized for over a year.

This prolonged estrangement from his family – forced upon him at such an impressionable age – had a profound and lasting impact, effectively severing him psychically from his cultural roots. Although he could still understand Spanish, he no longer spoke it after returning from the hospital.  He was unable to connect with his father, a hard-drinking workaholic, who seemed to him the embodiment of Latino masculinity. And His mother, a high-strung and superstitious woman, became incredibly over-protective, keeping him on a strict tasteless diet and forbidding him to go outside and play with other kids.

These childhood experiences sewed seeds of doubt that would plague him through the course of his career, even as a published author. When Hijuelos was a teenager, his father died suddenly of health complications brought on by his hard-drinking lifestyle. We learn from his memoir that much of the writer’s career has been a kind of catharsis, attempting to identify with his late father through the characters he’d create in his novels. Cesar Castillo, who narrates “Mambo Kings” from the end of his life, is an alcoholic Cuban immigrant based mostly on Hijuelos’ father.

The straight-forward manner in which Hijuelos describes the formative events of his life can seem at times almost dispassionate. But taken as a whole in its proper context, the story reads as that of a man who is now at peace with himself. There’s a quiet humility about the self-effacing tone which the author strikes; the chapter devoted to writing a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel for instance is blandly titled “another book.”

The creation of “Mambo Kings,” which involved a great deal of self-searching, almost didn’t come about. And even after it was published, Hijuelos was caught completely off guard by the extent of the reaction it received. The memoir doesn’t go much beyond the publication of “Mambo Kings,” as much of the heavy lifting seems to have been accomplished with its completion.

Devoid of any pretense or grandiosity, “Thoughts Without Cigarettes” is more remarkable for what it means, than what it says.