, I took all the clothes out of a closet, put a board across it, and I hung a light bulb so that I could have my typewriter there. That was my sacred space, my office. For the third book,, I had a computer and everything changed because I started getting the checks from the previous books, and finally, I could have a space of my own. We moved to a larger apartment and I had a room where I could write.
I had lost my country, my grandfather, my in-laws that I adored, my little house in Chile, my work, my friends, everything that was familiar to me. Writing thewas trying to get back all that. It was an exercise in nostalgia and in memory. I’m glad now that there was no one around to tell me how to do it, because maybe it would’ve screwed up the whole process. My then-agent called me a month after I sent her the manuscript and said, “I’m going to have your book published.