When Covid shut down the world, I retreated into nostalgia and decided to interview my uncles and my mother about coming to the United States from Costa Rica in the early 1960s. I intended to immortalize their American Dream immigrant history in a memoir told through the eyes of the house they had shared. But the curious thing about collecting family history is that everyone has a different version of the same story. My uncles and aunt remembered this about that. Mom remembered it wasn’t that, it was this or something else entirely.
Their mutable history could be distilled down to a sentence: They lived together through seasons of happiness and they dreamed as new Americans.
But that’s hardly a book. So armed with tidbits and details of my relatives’ arrivals and experience, I ditched the idea of deciphering what was true or not in their history and instead took threads of stories to weave into a whole new tale, reimagining different permutations and perspectives. Instead of memoir, I created a Bizarro World version of a much less functional immigrant family, a family driven by rivalry and resentment, and whose characters lack the joy my relatives remembered having.
It resulted in “The Lives of Saints,” the first part of Litany of Saints. In that novella, Ruth and Felipe – a couple who have spent their marriage chasing the American Dream – are hamstrung by her inability to break free of her family’s cultural and religious expectations. Then a life-threatening illness forces her to re-focus her desires while faced with the likely loss of her husband -- the one person she could have relied on to show her the way out.
Breaking free from the confines of reality is one of the things I found most fun about writing this section of my book. When I was a child, Mom said, she and my father would raise their eyebrows when I came home telling tales from my school days. They would call me a daydreamer behind my back.
In many ways, writing fiction is just fully giving into immersive daydreaming. I find it better than therapy because I get to detach my stream of consciousness from reality and control the narrative. Author Carlos Fonseca said that “life is, at the end of the day, the greatest fiction: a story we tell ourselves in order to keep going forward.”
I like that idea. Daydreaming, then, may just be part of the human condition, and fiction a tool for survival.