She was a member of the Academia Guatemalteca de la Lengua and the 1996 laureate of the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature.

Her father committed suicide when she was a child and she had to work to help support her family, going to night school to learn.

[3] From 1993 she worked as a columnist for Prensa Libre of Guatemala and published in many other newspapers, including Diario de Centro America, La Hora, and El Imparcial.

[4] In an interview in her 70s, Carrera said that she often wrote about men she found interesting and whom she studied to help her understand the man she never knew, her father.

Among those she studied and wrote about were Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.