As I was writing, I was wrestling with the way American nationalism (which I think patriotism is usually a euphemism for) devours movements and history.
I think the right to privacy is something that we have very blindly jettisoned in recent years. We are not at all aware of the damage it is doing to us, to have our privacy so invaded and marketed and sold.
I met Keila Vall de la Ville in New York in 2024, when I was on tour with my book. We are both Venezuelan, immigrant writers that have made the U.S. their home for a long time. But the reality is that I felt like I already knew her. It’s unfair, and wrong, to presume […]
We are all formed to some extent by the language, religion and customs in which we grew up, yes. But I am less interested in the ways culture makes people different from one another than I am in the ways we are all the same. It’s only by looking past cultural differences to what we humans have in common that I can get to the level of empathy and understanding I need to turn a character into a real human being.
I think that a lot of what I was trying to do in the book is to explore a sense of play within a knowledge that things probably won’t get better.
I was trying to capture something I feel very acutely in modern life, which is: if we don’t work intentionally at keeping connections and keeping people close, there is a drift.
The project became much more interesting to me as a novel, as satire, and as something with a lot of psychoanalytic dimensions, around the melancholic incorporation of voices of people whose politics we deeply reject.
I like that idea that forgetting can be generative. And I would add that forgetting is sometimes necessary to learning, to change.
The Lenin mummy has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for more than a hundred years now, after all.
If there is one place where one must not censor oneself, it is in art, isn’t it? If there is one place where there should be no social punishment, it is in art.