That’s life for you. All the happiness you gather to yourself, it will sweep away like it’s nothing. If you ask me I don’t think there are any such things as curses. I think there is only life. That’s enough.

but back then, in those first days, I was so alone that every day was like eating my own heart.

People can say what they want, but historically, feminism in the Dominican Republic has been extremely strong. I guess the best way of saying it is that no one could have survived what we survived - whether it was first extermination and slavery, then abandonment and erasure, then the series of gunboat two-bit dictatorships, followed by the final apotheosis of dictatorships, the Trujillato. You couldn't survive it without the resistance of this kind of woman.

Because I can't seem to escape it. It's a way for me to address and counter my questions about what it means to be human, or, in my case a Dominican human who grew up in New Jersey.

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

I'm having so much trouble with writing. Maybe if I help other people, it'll be easier for me.