Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans, joins us for a conversation about:
- Immigrant experiences
- Writing a novel with multiple voices to avoid the "single story"
- Research while writing historical fiction
- National Book Awards judging process
Listen
A transcript of this episode is available at the end of the show notes.
Recommended Reading
These are also moving family novels and short story collections by Latinx authors.
Contact
If you'd like to get in touch, send an email to deskset@kcls.org.
Credit
The Desk Set is brought to you by the King County Library System. The show is hosted by librarians Britta Barrett and Emily Calkins, and produced by Britta Barrett. Our theme song is "I Know What I Want" by Math and Physics Club. Other music provided by Chad Crouch, from the Free Music Archive.
Transcript
Emily Calkins:
You are listening to the Desk Set, a bookish podcast for reading broadly. I'm one of your hosts, Emily Calkins. And in this special feed drop, we're sharing the conversation that I had with author, Cristina Henriquez, who wrote The Book of Unknown Americans. Thanks for listening.
Cristina Henriquez:
My name is Cristina Henriquez and I am an author most recently of The Book of Unknown Americans, which is a novel.
Emily Calkins:
So The Book of Unknown Americans has two families who are at the heart of the center, but each chapter is narrated by a different character and many characters narrate just one or maybe two chapters. What drew you to the idea of multiple narrators?
Cristina Henriquez:
Yeah, there are 11 different narrators over the course of this book, and there are two main narrators, but then, those two main narrators live in an apartment building with a lot of other people who, almost all of whom get a chance at some point to speak and tell their story of coming to the United States. And everybody who lives in that apartment building comes from somewhere in Latin America and Puerto Rico and Mexico.
Cristina Henriquez:
And I think when I started this novel, it's hard to pinpoint things exactly, but I know that at some point I watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's amazing TED talk about the danger of a single story. And I think my interpretation of that partly was that the antidote to the single-story was to tell as many stories as possible. And so when I started writing this book, which was about immigrants, and one family in particular, who's coming from Mexico to the United States, I was very aware, I think at some level that there's a story we tell oftentimes about immigration and that story is in many cases overwhelmingly negative, or it has to do with crossing the border or it has to do with documentation.
Cristina Henriquez:
But that's like the only things that we would talk about in a national discussion of immigration. And I just thought what if I could write a novel that didn't necessarily focus on any of those things and that splintered apart the idea that there was a single narrative or a single way to tell the story of an immigrant and what an immigrant's life might be like in the United States. And so, because of that, I thought if I could populate this book with just as many people as I could cram in there altogether as many characters as I could fit that would do something on the other side of it.
Emily Calkins:
Do you ever think about going back to some of those secondary or tertiary characters? Are there any stories that you would want to explore or expand on more?
Cristina Henriquez:
I originally had like 20 different narrators. They were originally a lot of people and the ones that readers end up seeing now in the finished book are the ones that I felt the closest to, the ones that I felt the most connected to. But even within that subgroups, there are some that I really have a lot of affection for. I don't know if I would go back though. It's hard. I wrote this book over the course of five years, which is a long time to spend with a book and with characters even when you love them. And I think at the end of that five years, I was ready to walk away and let them be, and turn them over to the world.
Cristina Henriquez:
I think you never say never, but it's not really in my thinking now to go back to any of them, even though I do feel a lot of affection for some of them.
Emily Calkins:
So The Book of Unknown Americans has been used as a common read or a first-year read by quite a few colleges and universities. And I'm curious what the discussions inspired by those programs have been like for you and what has surprised you about students' reactions to the book?
Cristina Henriquez:
That's been an incredible thing that I did not see coming. If you spend five years writing a book, you're in a writing cave and you don't know during that period, or I certainly didn't know A, whether I would finish the book. B, whether it would get published. C, whether anyone would read it. And certainly, I didn't anticipate that it would be read in the broad way that it's been adopted, as you mentioned by schools and universities and communities all around the country.
Cristina Henriquez:
The discussions, especially among students tend to veer toward questions of identity and the topic of empathy. And so I find when I go to the schools, those are the things we talk about quite a bit. Students are really eager to hear my background and my life story, and how any of that may or may not have played into this book, but it's also been really overwhelming and heartening to see among a lot of Latinx students, how much it has meant to them.
Cristina Henriquez:
And again, this is not something I saw, I didn't foresee it as I was writing, but how much it has meant to them to read a book where they see either themselves or in many cases, their families, their parents represented. And a lot of times, they'll say, "I gave this to my mom to read alongside me." I think that's really cool this bridge between generations that maybe it provides. So yeah, I don't know. It's been a extremely humbling, overwhelming, and really incredible experience to go and talk to students about this book.
Emily Calkins:
So speaking a little bit more about your own experience and how that's shaped your writing, and also this idea of students seeing their parents represented, you grew up visiting your father's family in Panama. Is that correct?
Cristina Henriquez:
Yes.
Emily Calkins:
Can you talk a little bit about how growing up in the US with family abroad shaped your writing and how you think about what you want your fiction to be?
Cristina Henriquez:
Yeah. So my dad came to the United States when he was 18 years old or so. Like 1971, he came to study chemical engineering and he thought he would get his degree and then go back to Panama where his family lived and where they still live to this day. And he ended up meeting my mom instead, and she changed the course of his life. And so he stayed and they got married and now he's been here for more than 40 years.
Cristina Henriquez:
And we would go to Panama every year to visit his family and my side of - my family there, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody who was there. And I think I was eight months old, the first time we went and we have gone almost every year since, and it was such a formative experience for me because in one way I felt so connected to Panama. When we would go there, we weren't tourists. We were going and we were picking up a prescription at a pharmacy, or we were running to grab all the clothes off the clothesline because it was going to start to rain and we're helping my grandmother, whatever.
Cristina Henriquez:
So because of that, I had a real day-to-day experience of what Panamanian life was like. And I felt really connected to it. On the other hand, when I was there, there were times when my cousins would remind me that I was essentially a gringa, that I didn't exactly fit in. Also, it was complicated by the fact that I didn't speak Spanish. So my dad did not speak Spanish in the home when we were growing up, my mom who was also fluent in Spanish, didn't speak Spanish when we were growing up. So I would go to Panama and I would sit on the couch and everybody would be in a room together and they would be talking and laughing and I would have no idea what anybody was saying.
Cristina Henriquez:
So in a way, I think that made me a really good observer. And I sometimes wonder if that's part of why I became a writer or maybe the beginning of becoming a writer because I had to be a really good observer of just the people around me, but it also made me feel in a way disconnected to a place that I otherwise loved. On the other side of it, I was born in the United States. I grew up here, I've been here my whole life, but there were people I think in particular, by the time I got to high school, who seemed keen on making me aware of the fact that I was other than them, some of the things that happen in the novel to Mayor, where kids are calling him a pan, which is derogatory slang for Panamanian, or they're telling him to crawl back through the canal or asking if he's related to Noriega.
Cristina Henriquez:
Some of those are things that actually happened to me when I was in high school. And so I had a sense also that maybe I didn't quite belong in the United States either, at least to some people. So I think that duality and trying to reconcile that is something that has made its way into almost all of my fiction. And it's certainly, at times in The Book of Unknown Americans and it's been one of the biggest journeys of my life, trying to sort that out and figure it out. And I think I've made some progress, fortunately, but it's taken a long time. And so all of that has worked its way into my writing.
Emily Calkins:
So you've talked a little bit about how in The Book of Unknown Americans, you wanted to explore all of these different immigrant experiences and your father came here as a student and you said like this is not the story that we have about immigration. On the other hand, you wrote a story in the New Yorker a few years ago, about family separation at the border called Everything Is Far from Here, which is just a heart-wrenching, a gut-wrenching story. And I'm wondering if the national conversation around immigration in the last few years has changed the way that you choose your topics and think about what you want to write about and how you want to write about it.
Cristina Henriquez:
I think more so than the national conversation changing, what brings me to the page, I think just age and paying attention more and more as I've gotten older to the world around me, trying to understand the world, trying to contextualize everything, trying to make connections between why something that happened 50 years ago is still resonating today. All of that stuff, as I think, grabbed my attention more and more as I've gotten older. And it's interesting because sometimes people ask me, "What inspires you to write?"
Cristina Henriquez:
And I struggle with that word, actually. I think it's less about feeling inspired to write and more that I'm upset about something or I'm trying to work something out that doesn't make sense to me. And I think that that story in the New Yorker partly came from that, it was a story that I was reading news reports of, and this predates Trump, actually, these were news reports of children who were crossing at the border, who were being held in detention camps. I was just really moved by some of the things that I was reading, moved and I think outraged and that's, I think what made me pick up a pen and start to write that story.
Emily Calkins:
And are you working on something with similar themes now?
Cristina Henriquez:
I'm working on something now, another novel, but it's very different. It's not contemporary, it's a historical novel, but it also, I think taps into a lot of big sociopolitical questions hopefully. It's a mess right now. It's in a whole stack of notebooks on a desk and there's post-it notes involved and it's a mess right now. But in my head, hopefully, it has something to say about a different time but one that I think actually resonates with some of the things that we're going through now.
Emily Calkins:
What's different about writing a historical novel versus something contemporary like The Book of Unknown Americans.?
Cristina Henriquez:
The easiest answer to that is research. I've spent a good year or two years, I think, just doing research before I was even writing anything. I told myself, "Don't write anything of this novel, just take notes and research." And I've been doing a lot of research and there's a lot of stuff out there that I'm sure I still haven't even seen.
Emily Calkins:
I wonder about the kinds of research and I may be wrong about this, but reading The Book of Unknown Americans because there are characters from so many different places in Latin America, it's not like you're telling really a single story. You have to know what's happening or has happened in the last 50 years in Cuba or Panama or wherever. So it's not like The Book of Unknown Americans was without some sociopolitical context, but I can imagine that for something that's set in a historical context, it's a different kind of research, I guess.
Cristina Henriquez:
Yeah. At the research for The Book of Unknown Americans was, I think you rightly pointed out, it's about being able to understand at some level, all of these characters who are coming from these different places and what those places might be like. On the other hand, part of the project of that book was really just to make sure that everybody was absolutely human and that doesn't require research beyond just from paying attention to your life and the lives of people around you.
Cristina Henriquez:
The other thing in that book that needed a lot of research was the traumatic brain injury, which is a central element for one of the characters, for Maribel, and that was something I didn't know anything about. And so I read some medical texts to try to get a handle on that. The texts were somewhat helpful. What was most helpful actually was going on YouTube and I found videos of people who had suffered mild TBI and they were talking and I was actually less interested in hearing what had happened to them or their route for recovery. But I just wanted to hear them speak. I wanted to hear the cadence of their language and the rhythm of it. And I thought if I could hook into Maribel's voice in that way, then I might have some successes writing her as a character. So that was really helpful.
Cristina Henriquez:
But writing a historical novel is like, what did I write the other day? I wrote a phrase, Oh, I use the word ricocheting. And I underlined it as I wrote it because I was like, "I have to look that up. Would a character in this time know that word? What was the origin of that that word?" It's like that granularity that I think is, it takes quite a bit of time.
Emily Calkins:
Yeah. Voice is so important in The Book of Unknown Americans when you have all of those multiple narrators. And I think you're so successful at creating these individual voices so that you never are like, "Wait, who, who am I with? Who's telling me this?" I can imagine that trying to get that authenticity in a different time period is a whole different challenge.
Cristina Henriquez:
Yeah. I think so. It is and isn't because again, it's like the point of the book. The point of writing fiction is to rest right characters who feel more than anything, just human and they have to sound right for the time period, of course. And they have to sound right for their geography. There's a lot of things that go into what that voice sounds like and how you fine-tune a character's voice. But in some ways, I think sometimes we can make it more complicated than it has to be. And I think always just thinking about, they're just a person, they're a person, they're a person. What would they think about? What would they care about? Those kinds of concerns change very little from one time period to another, in some ways.
Emily Calkins:
So this is sort of a book nerd question, but you're a judge for the National Book Awards this year. And I am sure that you can't say too much about the details of what that's like, but I'm wondering if you can share a little bit about the process and your experience.
Cristina Henriquez:
Yeah. It was a fascinating behind the scenes look into what goes into choosing something like National Book Award winner. So we have a panel, I'm one of five judges on the fiction panel. And partly because of the pandemic, we were not able to get physical copies of books this year. So instead, we read all of our books on a Kindle, which was a totally different experience for me. I'm used to reading everything in print. So that was one hurdle from the beginning. But there's a mountain of books to get through and it was really interesting reading that many books back to back. I was essentially on a book a day schedule at a point.
Emily Calkins:
Wow.
Cristina Henriquez:
That's not normally how I read. I usually linger over various sentences and it can take me a few days to read a few pages. But reading all of those books back to back was an interesting way to get a different perspective on publishing and the kinds of books that are coming out. It was very clear when you came across a great book, it would just rise to the top and you just knew it right away. We knew it within the first 50 pages or something, and there were books, what I would finish the book and I would put it down and I would say that could win. There were some that just would blow you away. And it was really clear what those were and then we would convene and have these meetings, the five of us.
Cristina Henriquez:
And most of the time, we were in agreement because when you come across a great book, there's just nothing like that. So it was a very interesting experience and we're not done yet either. The winner is going to be announced in November, I believe it is. And we still have to have that meeting. We're down to our shortlist, our final five, but we still need to discuss and actually figure out who the final winner will be. I have my idea who I think it should be, but we'll see if everyone else agrees.
Emily Calkins:
So are you rereading now or are you able to step away from that a little bit and do some reading for yourself?
Cristina Henriquez:
I'm rereading the final five because I think that's fair. I want to give them all of the benefit of like, this is where I am now with my time. I have the time to stretch out and read them all in a little bit of a different way. So I've been going through them all again and finding things that I didn't see the first time, frankly. So that's been interesting. But I have had more time now to read on my own too. And it actually made me think like, why wasn't I reading more on my own before then?
Emily Calkins:
Now that you know you can read a book a day.
Cristina Henriquez:
Exactly. This forced consumption made me think like, geez, I should be reading more just when I can. Yeah. So I am doing a little bit of reading on my own, which is nice too.
Emily Calkins:
Well, that leads me into our last question, which is, what are you reading now?
Cristina Henriquez:
So right now I have decided to tackle Stamped from the Beginning.
Emily Calkins:
Okay.
Cristina Henriquez:
And I have that. I'm just finishing the Thomas Jefferson section. And I have a little notebook that I keep alongside the book so that I'm taking lots of notes as I read because there's just so much information there that I think there's a good chance by the time I finish it, some of it will have escaped me. So I wanted to keep notes as I'm reading. So I'm reading that.
Cristina Henriquez:
I'm also reading a galley right now of a book that's coming out. It's called Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia. And that's from Flatiron. And it's very good so far. So I'm working my way through that. And then I have been reading Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
Emily Calkins:
Oh, interesting.
Cristina Henriquez:
Yeah. I have it on my nightstand here and I just decided, there's certain books that you just somehow you get to a point in your life and you're like, "How did I never read that?" And that was one of those that I just thought maybe I should finally read it. So I have that here too.
Emily Calkins:
Great. Well, thank you so much for being with us today.
Cristina Henriquez:
Thank you.
