Who’s telling this story?

I love storytelling and especially enjoy the way different cultures handle narrative. I remember sitting at a kitchen table in a friend’s house, listening to her tell the story of the cadejo who visited her village once, back in Guatemala. The cadejo is a beast, somewhere between a black wolf and an evil dog; its eyes glow red and its fur smells of sulfur. My friend’s tales could keep me awake at night, but they were child’s fare compared to the real stories coming out of her homeland in the 70s and 80s.

How do you tell those stories when they aren’t yours? In this novel, I chose to have my narrators, Sydney and Julie, be people who are something like me (though I am not in their tax bracket!). Sydney has been close to Guatemalans and other Central Americans for decades; she knows their stories and knows her limits. Every story that is told in this novel is filtered through at least one other person, and sometimes two or three, but always with the awareness that things might have slipped and things might be missing, because who really knows what it’s like to be someone else? Who really knows everything that happened back then? And how can we ever tell a story (especially one that we inhabit) honestly?

Yet this is exactly what we do; we tell stories, imperfectly, dishonestly, even desperately. We tell stories because we want to make sense of our own narrative. I find that beautiful, and that is, in part, why I wrote this novel.