I’m grateful to my MFA buddy and friend, Diane Gottlieb, for placing this interview with me in The Bookends Review. The piece was published on April 13, 2022, but I’m a little behind in everything. An excerpt:
After you wrote Mamalita, you switched to fiction and wrote your first novel, Mother Mother. What was behind that decision?
After Mamalita was published, I realized there was more to say about family, belonging, identity and marriage. I’d already told our story. The story I wanted to tell—needed to tell—was broader and deeper. The only way to get my arms around it was through fiction.
You tell the story through two protagonists: Julie, the white adoptive mother, and Rosalba, the indigenous Ixil Maya mother of Juan, the boy Julie adopts. How did you create the voice of a woman whose life is so different from your own?
Imagining other lives is the work of a fiction writer. That said, I did a ton of research. First, from visiting Guatemala every year and knowing my kids’ birth mothers as well as many other women in Guatemala. Second, from witnessing testimonials of survivors of Guatemala’s civil war. Third, I read everything I could get my hands on— Straight up political histories of Guatemala, diaries and letters in translation, guides for midwives and Peace Corps volunteers. I immersed myself in Guatemala and absorbed the information into my body, almost as an actor might. Then I sat down and put it on the page.
Thanks for reading the entire interview here. xoxo
