Foreign Correspondence IV

An interview at The Rumpus!

Hello! Elizabeth González James was kind enough to interview me about my novel over at The Rumpus. It’s the longest conversation I’ve had in print about the book so far, and I think it turned out rather nicely. Here’s a bit to whet your appetite:

The Rumpus: Can you tell me a little about how you came to the idea of América del Norte? How did the story evolve over time?

Nicolás Medina Mora: The story itself, the plot of the novel, was a relatively late development. América del Norte was originally going to be a book-length essay that braided an impressionistic history of Mexico. When I began writing the book, I was relatively happy. Then geopolitical events—the election of Donald Trump in the United States and later of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico—derailed the course of my biography. As I began coming to terms with the fact that I was not going to be able to stay in the United States, where I had lived for ten years, and that I would have to return to Mexico, where the new government was openly hostile to my family, I had an epiphany: my boring, privileged life had been interrupted by History with a capital H. This interruption was unfortunate, but it also meant my life was suddenly interesting to me,if not anyone else. I no longer understood my life. That’s when the idea of América del Norte began to coalesce. I came to see that what I was experiencing was a direct consequence of the history of the continent. The result was that the book became increasingly narrative, until one day I printed it out to revise it and realized what I had in my hands was no longer an essay but a novel.

Thanks for reading, friends!