Acclaimed Writer Esmeralda Santiago Weaves an Intricate Story of Memory, Loss, and Puerto Rico in Her New Novel, ‘Las Madres’

Santiago discusses her new intergenerational tale.

by SARAH NEILSON

At the start of Esmeralda Santiago’s gorgeous new novel, Las Madres, a young Puerto Rican girl named Luz is stressed about her ballet class. It’s the ’70s, and a highly respected teacher is visiting her class, but he proceeds to nitpick and berate her on her form and dance. On the way home, Luz and her parents are in a major accident that leaves Luz with a brain injury that affects her memory, so she resorts to finding a new creative outlet in drawing. Her grandfather takes her to live in the Bronx, New York, and Luz becomes enfolded into a found family of herself, Ada, and Shirley — the titular Las Madres. And as time goes on, Luz has a daughter named Marysol, while Ada and Shirley raise their own daughter, Graciela. When the women decide to take a vacation to Puerto Rico, a place where some of them have never been and the others have not been in decades, they end up on the island during Hurricane Maria.

The book is sprawling in scope but tightly woven as a story, and every character is richly detailed, and the women together create a tapestry of love and family that is a joy to read. The author of three memoirs and two previous novels, Santiago is a deeply gifted storyteller, capturing the depth of her characters and extending care to all of them as she grapples with themes like memory, grief, and identity.

Shondaland spoke with Santiago about the things that inspired an obsession with memory and history, the importance of art and self-expression -- and Puerto Rico as a survivor, a home, and a crucially important place.

SARAH NEILSON: Was there anything specific that inspired this story?

ESMERALDA SANTIAGO: Yes. Las Madres actually began as something else. I was interviewing my parents at the end of their lives, and I was kind of obsessed with the whole concept of memory and what is left behind when somebody goes. The more I interviewed them and the more painful it became that there are so many things and so many experiences they had that no one will ever know about, I just started thinking about memory itself. Then this character [Luz] just kind of emerged from this question about what it is like to not have a memory. We carry our history with us, and in order to have context in our lives and in society and in our cultures, we have to have a sense of what came before us. What happens when somebody doesn’t have that? That was how she emerged, much to my surprise, from this question about memory and not having any.

SN: Can you expand on the idea of what it means to have an injury to your memory?

ES: About 12 years ago, I had a stroke at an early age for somebody to get a stroke. And that affected my written comprehension. I understood everything people said to me. I could listen to audiobooks, and I understood everything, but anything that was written down was like looking at a foreign language with a different alphabet. I think this is where my obsession with memory begins. I am a writer, and I would write something on a page or on the computer, and I would see the letters appearing at my hands, but I myself could not read what I had just written. I could not understand what it said. So, that curiosity about what memory is begins from this experience. When the character of Luz emerged, I really understood that isolation that a person experiences when they have had any kind of brain injury. In my case, people would say to me, “Oh, but you don’t look as if you had a stroke.” And I would really hearken back to when I was a younger woman, and people would say, “Oh, but you don’t look Puerto Rican.” I’m thinking, “How does one look without having had a stroke? How does one look not being Puerto Rican? What is that determination?” So, identity and memory are very intertwined in my life and in my preoccupations. To me, it’s all connected. … That isolation was something that I experienced as a person who came to the United States from another culture, another language, and another society. And of course, it happens to Luz because of this brain injury that completely alters her future.

SN: I really like what you said about the isolation that comes with that kind of injury. Can you talk about crafting the family in this story, especially the created family of Las Madres and their daughters, and how counteracting isolation plays into that?

ES: I think Las Madres and Graciela were very aware about Luz’s isolation, and they tried to correct it by constantly being there for her in many ways. She really did become like a child to the two older women, and they took care of her the way they would take care of their own children. That’s part of my culture; you have your biological family, but you also have people around you that are family to you even though you might not share the DNA. In the case of my family, I’m the eldest of 11 children, but my mom raised many other people’s children with her third husband. (It’s funny that I have to think about how many husbands it was.) With her third husband, she actually raised his six children, and she didn’t think of them differently than she did us. And we as sisters and brothers also treated them with the same attention and annoyance, which are a part of being in a family. As a mother myself, I have had nieces and nephews and children that are not related to me who have lived in my home with me, and this is something that’s completely acceptable. It exists in my culture, and I’m familiar with it.

SN: Can you talk about the role of art and self-expression for Luz as a character who has this injury, and also for you as a writer?

ES: I was the kid who was always looking for ways to express myself. I wanted to draw, I wanted to sing, I wanted to dance. There was something in my makeup that required that. When I’m not able to express myself artistically, I’m not a happy person. And no, I am not a very good sketcher or drawer or painter or sculptor, but I do it just because it makes me feel better. I was a dancer for many years, and I tried to be an actress [but] not successfully. But the arts are necessary for my survival and my well-being. When I’m sad, depressed, even when I’m scared, I turn to art; I turn to music. I will go to a museum. I’ll walk through a sculpture garden ... anything that takes me out of myself and into the mind of somebody else trying to communicate with me through their artistic efforts. So, it was very important to me that Luz, who is a dancer when we first meet her, can no longer dance because of her physical injuries. She had to have some artistic outlet, especially because of her isolation. It seemed natural that she would turn to something like drawing because she’s able to express something that she’s unable to do with words and with no memory. If you’re painting or drawing, you’re there at that moment. And it helps you to feel like you’re part of something greater than yourself, which is, I think, what art does for me.

SN: Can you talk about Puerto Rico and its pivotal importance in this story for the personal, and also more sociopolitical, histories of these characters? Especially before and after Hurricane Maria.

ES: Everything I’ve written comes from a place of my Puerto Ricanness, from my childhood in Puerto Rico, and from the fact that if somebody were to ask me to describe myself, I would always say I am a Puerto Rican woman before I say anything else — mother, wife, and all the other things that that I am. My identity as a Puerto Rican is very, very important to me, and it really is what makes it possible for me to speak about anything because, again, I have a context. These women [in the book], some of them were not born in Puerto Rico, and one of them particularly had not been to Puerto Rico. And yet they still have that connection to the culture, to the history, to the people, to the island far away from them. If they’re living in northern Maine or in Seattle or in Japan, it always feels like home. I’m not sure if that’s an island thing or if it’s just a Puerto Rican thing, but I know that we as Puerto Ricans are very, very connected to that island and everything that happens in it. So when something like a hurricane attacks our home, we become active in trying to do something around it, with it, against it ... whatever the moment requires. That’s one of the things that I don’t even think about when I write my books. Puerto Rico is in me, I am Puerto Rico, and I write about Puerto Ricans. And yes, there are people from other places, but the ones that I know are the ones who are from that place, and they’re the ones that I want to write about.

"I did not sit down and say I’m gonna write about a teenage ballerina who has a brain injury. She came to me. I try to trust my quirky process. I accept that I’m surrounded by ghosts who want me to tell their stories, and I’m willing to do it if they will continue to speak to me.

SN: What does survival mean to these characters at different points in the story, and how is it a story of love helping them survive?

ES: Speaking now for the Puerto Rican that I am, that identification with that place, even if we have never been there, it does help us to survive whatever may come. Because it’s a point of reference for us. I can’t even tell you how many hundreds of letters or emails or texts I receive from people who will say, “I’m a Puerto Rican who has never been to Puerto Rico” or “My mother was born there, and she always talked about it. And when she passed, it was the saddest thing that she hadn’t been able to go to the island for X number of years.” There’s this longing for this place that draws me, and I realize that it draws a lot of us. The place itself has greater meaning to us than it does to the entire rest of the world and the rest of history, especially the history of this hemisphere. We’re a very tiny part of it, but we’re very, very loyal to that place and to that island. And those of us who have read the history get even more enamored of this place because Puerto Rico itself is a survivor. It has survived invasions and hurricanes and earthquakes and pandemics. I mean, it’s really incredible. And of course, it’s the people who are there who make it possible. But because it itself is a survivor, I think it gives us a sense of strength that we too can get over whatever it is that we’re going through right now. In the case of my character Luz, even somebody who loses their memory still has a sense of herself even though she doesn’t know what that self is. She’s frequently asking, “Am I this person? Am I the person I’m seeing in the mirror? Who is the person that people see outside of me?” This is a question of identity that I have been grappling with since I came to the United States, and I try to find many different ways to express it, to discover more about it, and then in some way to settle myself within that. It’s a constant theme of my life.

SN: What was important for you to explore about sex and sexuality for these women?

ES: I believe in sex and frequent sex. And it’s something that I’m not embarrassed about. It’s something that I think is part of life. I think whether you have it or you don’t have it, you think about it. So, my characters, the people that I write about … it’s no accident that I would think about this since I am the eldest of 11 children, so I was very aware of reproduction and how things happened. It’s something that I feel very comfortable with. I also feel like we need to accept it as part of life. Whether we do it or not, it’s part of our lives, and we’re surrounded by it. I’m the kind of writer who’s not embarrassed by it, who’s not afraid of it, and who celebrates it.

SN: How do you cultivate a creative life for yourself?

ES: I always find inspiration by reading a lot. I read widely. I read a lot of history. I travel as much as I can. I read books by people who are unlike me. I just love a good translated book from someplace that I may never be able to visit on my own for whatever reasons. I just try to stay curious, stay open, and I also keep my ears open for characters to speak to me, and I just trust that they will do that. I did not sit down and say I’m gonna write about a teenage ballerina who has a brain injury. She came to me. I try to trust my quirky process. I accept that I’m surrounded by ghosts who want me to tell their stories, and I’m willing to do it if they will continue to speak to me.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah Neilson is a freelance culture writer and interviewer whose work regularly appears in The Seattle Times, Them, and Shondaland, among other outlets. They are an alum of the Tin House craft intensive, and their memoir writing has been published in Catapult and Ligeia.