Family is a huge thing in my culture, it’s kind of ride or die for your blood family, and the notion of stepping away from or rejecting them for virtually any reason is enormous. At the same time… we have a lot of crap going on today that is just awful, awful, awful, and it’s… I’m trying not to get too hardcore about it but you have to be, it’s inexcusable — so there are people, maybe our family members, who are supporting stuff that is absolutely unsupportable. What do you do when you’re faced with that? What do you do when you have a family member who is a white supremacist or a hardcore misogynist or anti-abortion rights? What do you do with someone who you essentially should be loving by virtue of being related to them, but they’re doing this awful stuff? That was something I wanted to explore, but also just notions of people who had been rejected by their families or who have had to come to terms with that fact their families don’t accept them for who they are, and that that’s not going to change and they have to step away and find their own path.
Pink’s introduction, in which she offhandedly mentions making her own hormones, is one instance of a theme in the book where character traits (like Eva’s tendency to curse in untranslated Spanish) are presented immersively — you either get it or you don’t. Can you talk a little about the significance of that choice? How did that affect your worldbuilding?
I’ve always felt like immersive worldbuilding is the way I naturally gravitate towards stuff. I know that doesn’t work for everyone and I appreciate that — there are definitely readers who are looking for more like a D&D manual or something, where they want a lot of description and explanation, a lot of background, and to me that always feels very infodump-y. When I’m working on a story, I usually have all that in my head or my notes, but when I’m actually putting stuff on the page, what I try to do is add stuff in seamlessly, because if you’re doing a limited third-person POV, chances are they’re not going to give a ton of thought to the things that are very mundane for them. In writing, it’s much more difficult than in visual media, where you can have things on the screen for people to look at and that are set dressing but can be immersive. When I’m making these immersive worlds, I have this very tight third-person POV, so what Eva sees is what you see, what she experiences is what you experience, and as she’s going through the world and interacting with it, those are the details that you’re going to get.
Regarding the language situation… when I was first writing the book, I wanted to have a character who unapologetically spoke in one of her original languages. Eva’s bilingual… and when I was writing, I wanted to have her be able to just unapologetically live in both languages, to have her be able to say things on the page without them being translated. And I know other people have complained about that, like, “who is this book for?” and “why do I have to have Google open when I’m reading?” and whatever. Like, yeah, but that happens with a lot of books, you know? I have an English Literature major, and you’ll open up James Joyce and he’s punning in four languages and you have to have a bunch of dictionaries open. You can usually just go with it.
