Each Abyss Is Personal | A Conversation with Claudia Piñeiro
Interviews
By William Boyle
As someone who was abandoned by my father, I had a very emotional response to Claudia Piñeiro’s A Little Luck, a novel about a woman who leaves her family in Argentina behind after a tragic event for a new existence abroad. In Boston, she has had a long-term relationship with a man named Robert, who she met on her flight to the United States while fleeing Argentina. She teaches Spanish at his language school, the prestigious Garlik Institute. The novel begins with her return to the city that she fled, Temperley, following Robert’s death—he has posthumously arranged for her to visit St. Peter’s, the English school where her son had been a student when she disappeared. Her task is to evaluate whether the school will be certified as an affiliate of the Garlik Institute, a highly sought-after designation among such institutions. She arrives in disguise as Mary Lohan, the identity she’s assumed over the preceding twenty years. When she lived in Temperley, she was Marilé Lauría, whose husband, Mariano, ran a clinic and whose young son, Federico, was a student at St. Peter’s. She chose to leave Argentina as a form of punishment to herself, believing Mariano and Federico would be better off separated from the guilt she felt responsible for attaching to the whole family, concluding that “a living death” was a better alternative to suicide, which would’ve freighted them with a different kind of burden. Now, upon returning, she is confronted by ghosts of the past at every step, finally facing down the trauma that has shaped her. My own abandonment is nothing like this, of course. It’s boring. A father who split on a family he no longer wanted. A son trying to reckon with that, suffering through a series of false fathers, and finally becoming a father himself and confronting his biggest fears. The story at the heart of A Little Luck—the tragedy, Mary’s escape—is far more dramatic and devastating. It’s also very much a novel about parenthood, regret, and yearning, and that’s why it hit me so hard.
The galley I have of a A Little Luck is more marked up than any book of mine since grad school. The front pages filled with notes and observations. Marginalia throughout. American audiences might be reluctant to think of it as a crime novel, but in fact it’s my favorite kind of crime novel—haunted, philosophical, edging up against the darkest impulses of desperate and damaged people. Piñeiro’s characters tell their stories in letters, emails, and logbooks, and she has a poet’s sense of how best to utilize refrain and repetition. She’s also a master of exploring time and memory, fate and chance, identity and communion, truth and silence. On the surface, the premise is simple: it is impossible to know how a person will deal with a terrible situation until it happens. All it takes is one moment to alter everything, for all that’s been built to come crashing down. The crime at the heart of this book isn’t a crime at all. The crime is simply being alive and falling victim to circumstances beyond one’s control. Piñeiro’s handling of the material is breathtaking.
As with many readers of English, the brilliant Elena Knows—released in 2021 by Charco Press—was my introduction to Piñeiro. This is the second book of hers I’ve read, and she’s very quickly become one of my favorite writers (I should say I’ve also become a huge fan of Charco since then, picking up pretty much everything they’ve published). We are, of course, far behind. Piñeiro is South America’s bestselling crime novelist and Argentina’s third most translated author after Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. I was honored to connect with her to talk about the book. Frances Riddle, who translated A Little Luck and Elena Knows, also translated Piñeiro’s responses here.
William Boyle: I have long been drawn to stories of people who abandon their lives and establish new identities. The plot of A Little Luck doesn’t have a ton in common with classic noir frameworks that involve doppelgängers, but Mary (previously Marilé/María Elena) returns home essentially in disguise. Many of the novel’s most important themes center around identity. How did you think about identity over the course of the making of the book?
Claudia Piñeiro: Identity is a concept I think about often, beyond the writing of A Little Luck. Who are we? Are we the person we show to the world? Or is there some other hidden part of us that might one day be revealed? How is a person’s identity created? Are there second chances, can we change who we are and be born anew? I’m interested in putting characters in that quandary of the plot (or of life). Mary or Marilé has to define who she was, who she is, and who she wants to be. Then there are others who have to decide if they accept one identity or the other or not. But beyond the issue of identity itself, it’s no minor detail that I live in a country where the word “identity” has another connotation and it’s something we reflect on constantly. And that’s because the military dictatorship in Argentina [in the 1970s and 80s] appropriated minors whose parents had been forcibly disappeared. They separated children from their families, changed their names, and erased their previous histories, without leaving any register of where they’d come from, often handing them over to the very people who had tortured and killed their parents. These children are now adults unknowingly living a life that’s not their own. This novel isn’t about the military dictatorship, but it takes place in a country where that happened.
A few years ago, I wrote a play for a theater festival called Teatro X Identity (Theatre for Identity). It’s a festival that takes place within the framework of the search for these appropriated children sponsored by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.¹ The objective is to build awareness for this situation that occurred in Argentina and to encourage anyone who thinks they might be one of these children to register with the database and check their genetic information. In previous years, all the plays in the festival were about how the military dictatorship robbed these children’s identity and stripped them away from their true families. But the year I participated, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo asked specifically for plays where the theme of identity was present, but under other circumstances. Their argument was that there were a lot of people who felt like the military dictatorship’s appropriation of minors had nothing to do with them, and the grandmothers thought that if we could talk about identity in the broader sense, if we could manage to transmit the importance of that value, people would understand the seriousness of what the dictators had done. The play I presented, following those guidelines, was about a woman who had countless problems because her last name had the letter “ñ,” which doesn’t appear on English-language keyboards or paperwork and that leads her into Kafkaesque situations. It’s a play with a bit of humor, that twenty years later is still put on in many theaters here in Argentina. I think it’s thanks to that play and the reflections that the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo led me to have that I am very aware of the importance of identity and its dramatic consequences in stories.
WB: How did you settle on the structure? Your use of documents—the logbook, the letters and emails—stands out. I was especially struck by your ability to blend the narrative with such documents—the oneness of it all.
CP: Thanks so much. I like to turn to different narrative discourses to tell a story. I think it creates a more active role for the reader, by forcing them to put the puzzle together. I’ve done it in other novels too. But this story I’m telling in A Little Luck is also a puzzle that has to be put together little by little—all of those elements have to come together to add to the voice of the narrator. Maybe my inspiration comes from the admiration I have for Argentine author Manuel Puig, who is a master of disassembling discourse by introducing resources of that kind (books, diaries, letters).
WB: Building on that, I love the role that literature plays in Mary’s story. Given that use of documents, the book is largely about the act of writing—confronting past traumas through the written word, human communion through literature. Did the books that Robert introduces to Mary just show up as lifelines for her, or were they more clearly influences on what you were doing? An excerpt from Alice Munro’s “The Children Stay” also appears as an epigraph. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed, and other works play a significant part in keeping Mary from the edge of the abyss.
CP: I love to recommend books. I do it often. And I’ve felt saved by the written word after a period of silence. So, even though this book has nothing autobiographical about it, I think that we are always lending personal traits to our characters. To the characters we like and the ones we don’t like. What’s important, when writing a novel, is that the author doesn’t get ahead of the narrator, that they don’t make them say things that the author wants to say but that aren’t relevant to that narrator and that story. So the books recommended by the protagonist are texts that interest me, many of them were very important to the writing of the book, but I tried—and hopefully I’ve achieved it—to only include books that were fundamental for Mary in her process of rebirth.
WB: I recently taught a class on time and memory in crime fiction, and I talked a lot about Elena Knows. I wish I’d read A Little Luck before the class—it’s also largely devoted to notions of time and memory. The past is always present. All time is simultaneous, and yet time passing is felt, and thought is given to the possibilities of the future. How do you think about time and memory in your work?
CP: I have to once again turn to my country and its particularities. Because we’re social creatures who are conditioned and formatted by the societies we live in. In my country a great importance is placed on memory. Identity and memory are key values. Only memory can assure that we avoid making the same mistakes. In other countries, like Spain for example, the issue of those killed under Franco wasn’t brought to the forefront in the same way that it was here in Argentina, where we tried and sentenced the military men responsible, we created a written memory of events, we continue to talk about what happened, we have a national holiday called Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice. Spain also has mass graves, people buried as John or Jane Doe, and appropriated children. But by focusing on memory and repair in a different way, there are still some open wounds that appear sometimes. Today the direct witnesses to that period in Spain are dying. And many Spanish people are worried about what will happen to those memories.
But getting back to the novel: memory is fundamental to this story, because it’s what keeps Marilé from disappearing completely and she has the chance to reappear in Mary. Without memory that wouldn’t be possible. I wrote another novel after this one, Catedrales, where one of the characters has problems with short-term memory, they can’t remember recent events, and that allowed me to really reflect on the importance of memory. In that novel there’s an epigraph by Luis Buñel that reads: “You have to begin to lose your memory, even if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives . . . Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling.” I couldn’t agree more with those lines from My Last Sigh. And time . . . I think time is seeped into the marrow of what I write and it’s very important that you’ve mentioned it, because some people say that I always write themes related to death, and it’s true, but it’s true in the sense that there’s an awareness of the finite nature of time, that there is a present and a past but we don’t know how much future. Not knowing how much time we have marks that finiteness. The awareness of the finite is also present in everything I write.
WB: The book is also concerned with notions of happiness—what’s possible under certain circumstances, especially if you’re born melancholy or feel doomed by fate. In many ways, it’s an investigation into the idea that it’s possible to regain a sense of happiness after being so badly damaged. I found it ultimately very hopeful. What was it like to create Mary’s journey? Were you worried about her? Were there times when you felt a lack of hope for the outcome of her return home?
CP: I think I gave Mary the happiness that was possible for her, the happiness she was able to have. I was very aware that the character could change, her melancholy could lift a little, but that it had to be a small movement, one that made sense, her feelings couldn’t shift radically. I could repair some of her damage, I could give her another chance. But I couldn’t erase everything that had happened. That would’ve minimized the value of memory. I also think that the protagonist was able to change thanks to the help she receives throughout the story, from Robert, from her own son. While I was writing I was worried about the darkness that I was going to plunge Marilé’s character into, but I knew that she was going to find a possible way out. Something very strange happened to me as I was writing: I cried. Actually not as I was writing but when I went back and reread it. And it’s strange, that’s never happened to me before. During writing I was able to maintain distance, but in the moment of editing and assuming the role of reader, I couldn’t hold back my tears. I felt ridiculous, since I was the one who had made up this story, I’d taken the character there, I knew how it ended. But I still cried.
WB: Cormac McCarthy passed away recently, and there’s been a lot of discussion about The Road being one of the greatest novels ever written about parenthood. A Little Luck is very different from The Road, but I was equally impacted in terms of how you write about motherhood—the fear, the anguish, the yearning, the love that drives you to do things you believe to be in your child’s best interest. “How far will a mother go to spare her child pain?” Mary asks, and that seems to be one of the central questions the book is tangling with. A Little Luck is a profoundly beautiful book about parenthood and forgiveness. One of the novel’s dedications is to your children—how did your ideas and experiences as a mother shape the way you dealt with Mary’s story?
CP: We’re thrown into motherhood or fatherhood without being prepared for it. You don’t study to become a father or a mother, no one gives you a degree in it. And often it’s trial and error. Only that it’s our own kids, that’s why we feel so guilty. Instinct isn’t enough to be a good mother or father. For a long time they wanted to make us believe that it was, and that brought with it a lot of trauma and guilt, because if things weren’t going well it was because we were failing, because there was something wrong with us. I’m very interested in writing about motherhood in conflict, about how every day we as women try to be more compassionate with ourselves and question the roles assigned to us that feel like they were branded on us with fire. And in that sense it’s crucial to feel the freedom to talk about these things without the love for our children being placed in doubt. Because for some people that love impedes us from talking about the chiaroscuro of motherhood and fatherhood and I want to defend the right to address those topics. In many interviews I’ve given, about this book, or about my latest one too (El tiempo de las moscas), which also includes a serious questioning of motherhood, they ask me if I’m a mother. And I think what they want to ask, but don’t dare, is if I love my children; I’m sure they’re thinking it. These are questions that aren’t usually asked of male writers. Also, this novel is dedicated to my children (as you mentioned) and I thank my children in every book I’ve ever written, so the fact that I’m a mother is right there. So they should know the answer, but the discomfort my work produces for some journalists is so great that they just have to ask anyway, as if in spite of the book’s dedication, they need to confirm it.
WB: As much as this is a novel about parenthood, it is also a novel of place. One of my favorite things in literature is the theme of return. Mary returns to the source of all her trauma—Temperley, Argentina—after twenty years abroad in Boston, where she’s created a new life with Robert, the man she met on the plane while fleeing Argentina. Temperley is haunted for Mary—by what occurred there, by who she left behind. How did you approach thinking about place through the lens of return?
CP: Something that I was interested in exploring was if you can ever go back to the same place. You go back after twenty years to the same country, the same city, the same street, but is it really the same place? Mary feels like it’s not, and she sees that it’s not. And it’s not only a matter of feeling: places change, they transform, they become something else. I went back to where my father grew up, a port city in Galicia, Spain. He never went back and when I did his house was gone, they’d put a building there. But, in the census archives for the city—Portosín—my father’s name was marked with an “A” for absent, years after he’d left. The place had changed, his house had disappeared, but he remained in the registered memory of that town. I often return to the place I was born, very near Temperley, in the south of Greater Buenos Aires. I have friends there, family, memories. But the place has changed, and in every visit I keep discovering new changes.
WB: Of course, the title reveals another of the novel’s major concerns: luck. How one instant can derail everything you’ve previously known. How an unexpected encounter can send you hurtling down a new road to a new life. Mary is confronted at every turn—in the present narrative but also in the haunted moments of her past—by such encounters with luck and chance and fate. What role does luck play in your writing process? In creating Mary’s story were there moments that surprised or upset you? Did luck lead you anywhere unexpected?
CP: From the very outset of writing this book, I felt that this story found its way to me by fate. When I was a little girl, a family from the town where I lived went through a situation similar to the one the novel poses. Not exactly the same but very similar. I wasn’t there the day of that accident, I didn’t see it, but I was at the mass when my friends and other people from the town pointed out the woman, who like Mary had survived the accident. She was standing off to the side way in the back, like she didn’t want to be seen, and everyone was whispering about her. I witnessed that woman’s pain, and then much later, after I became a writer, the memory of that pain reemerged and I invented the rest of the story. There was also another twist of fate. As I was writing the novel and asking myself how Mary’s son would’ve been affected by what happened, and if there was any chance of a possible future relationship between them, I received a letter from the son of a writer who I’d written a profile about. He’d read my piece about his mother, which mentioned how she’d gone through a process that led her to leave her children temporarily. The letter from her son was very heartfelt and he thanked me for having taken such a compassionate stance on his mother, something which hadn’t happened among his relatives when she left home. That real letter, that real son, about his real mother, gave me the hope I needed for the end of this novel.
William Boyle is the author of the novels Gravesend, The Lonely Witness, A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself, City of Margins, and Shoot the Moonlight Out. His novella Everything Is Broken was published in Southwest Review Volume 104, numbers 1–4. His website is williammichaelboyle.com.
[1] Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo is an organization of grandmothers formed during the dictatorship to learn what happened to their missing grandchildren when their own children—the kids’ parents—had been killed or disappeared. The organization is still fighting today to locate these children forty years later. About 130 children have been recovered with some 300 still yet to be found.
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