Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive.
She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. She lives in New York City. Beginning Middle End is her new novel, available now.
As I was reading Beginning Middle End, I happened to pick up some of your earlier books again, and I was really intrigued to see that the idea of beginnings and middles and ends recurs so often across your work. In this book, there are many ways you’re engaging with that idea — as a way to understand generations of women, how to fit a narrative into a structure, and time itself. This book talks so much about time, linearity, and circularity. And when I finished that last chapter, it made me want to go back and immediately start from the beginning — it had created this little cycle.
I love that you say that. The book is thought of as a book that should be read twice somehow. Without the prescription to be read twice — I have no interest in prescribing any kind of reading experience — but if it is read twice, it is a book that gains two very different meanings, because it’s written in such a way that there is a current and an undercurrent.
The undercurrent is the daughter’s psyche, her own vision and experience of the world, the way she puts narrative together. And just the way currents are, you feel her undercurrent sometimes pushing upwards, you see it emerge here and there, because she’s in dialogue with her mother, so her soul is coming out in those snippets, but it isn’t until the end that the undercurrent becomes the overcurrent, and we hear her own torrent, her own imagination taking over. And once that happens, it re-signifies, from the end to the beginning, the entire novel. The way she’s been organizing meaning — and when I say meaning, I mean connectivity between what seem like discrete events — the way she puts it together is so different from what the mother is seeing in front of her. The mother doesn’t see what the girl sees. So once you’ve seen everything from the viewpoint of the girl, if you reread the novel, you are swimming in the undercurrent, so to speak.
I think the other thing that really struck me — with the character of the daughter specifically, but it’s also true of other characters — is how the book talks about memory. There is this fear of memory loss, of a loss of clarity. And there is a moment where the daughter experiences a sort of false memory — she has this memory, but it’s not something she experienced, it actually happened to her fictional counterpart in a book written by her mother. And I also really enjoy a moment in the book where the narrator is talking about how we can think of scenes from movies almost more intensely than memories from our own lives.
And scenes from books as well.
It’s so true! I was thinking of that kind of murkiness between fiction and memory. I also read Borges’s story Shakespeare’s Memory after reading your book, which has this really intriguing idea of a parallel memory. I was wondering about this place between memory and fiction, and what draws you to that.
It’s such a good, and such a vast question, right? It’s very difficult to navigate thought about memory because it is so ungraspable. The relationship between memory and imagination is such a difficult one to pin down because it is very much like the behavior of winds or tides. Things get mixed up, and there isn’t necessarily a clear divide.
To go back to one of the thoughts that you strung together here in formulating your question, you said that often what we see — and I said what we read — imprints itself with a great intensity, sometimes greater than our lived experience. I really think that is the case. I wonder if it is the case because when one is reading, if you’re an active reader and you’re putting your imagination at the service of the language in front of you, then you are in a very intense neurological experience in which you are creating images that are being suggested to you by words. That’s a very powerful electric storm in the mind that I think leaves a very deep imprint in us.
When I think about our memory as readers, and I think about that wonderful story, Shakespeare’s Memory by Borges, perhaps one of the best philosophical stories ever written, I think always that it is more than anything a kind of allegorical canvas, where what Borges is painting is the relationship between two memories: the memory of our lived experience as individuals, and the memory that we inherit, or borrow, or take from everything we read, and how those two memories are not quite distinguishable. Not in a psychotic sense that we can’t tell what happened to us and what happened to a character in a book, that we’re completely lost in the real and the not-real — I don’t mean that, of course — but something much more subtle than that, which is that we inherit from literature the very scaffolding, the structure, the internal architecture of the universe that we inhabit, the way things are put together, the way we sequence events to tell a narrative, the way we understand story. And it is with that, what we learn from storytelling, either as readers or as listeners to stories, that we give form to everything in our lives. The sentences we make, the way we tell anecdotes, the way we experience a loss, the way we experience love — it is all so deeply determined by that narrative scaffolding that we inherit from storytelling and story-reading.
That’s lovely. I don’t know if this is true actually, but there is the idea that every time you retrieve a memory, you’re kind of wearing it out a bit, like you’re changing it. Have you heard of that or what do you think of that?
There’s that image that comes up in the book at least once of desire paths and how they are formed by people treading on the same unplotted ground once and again and again, and eventually the ground becomes scarred with the repetition of footsteps. If that were to be juxtaposed or extrapolated to be thought of as an image of memory and memories and how they work, perhaps it is true that the more we tread on the ground of a specific memory, the more we change it. I don’t know what that change means, if it becomes more ingrained, or as you said, we wear it out, we erode it. Perhaps there is something of an erosion of feeling associated to memory when we play it over and over or say it over and over. I know that a lot of psychiatric and psychological therapies, for example, for PTSD, have this in mind, when they revisit a memory in such a way so as to separate it from the experience of shock. I’m not sure — I don’t know very much about this, so I shouldn’t go into those waters! But I do understand that there is something in retelling that allows us to associate different feelings to a told memory.
Ultimately, to go back to the relationship between fiction and memory, there is just no way that we can really separate the two things. And what is important in that is that I’m not understanding fiction as non-truth, when I say that. I mean it much more as a structure, as form-giving.
One of the first things that Borges mentions is that memory and sound are very closely connected. You’ve been working with sound and writing about sound for quite some time now. There’s a “sonic book” version of Beginning Middle End where the soundscape is composed of field recordings from the places the book visits. What was collecting those sounds like? How did writing and listening with this book impact each other, if it was a two-way street?
Oh, definitely. I’ve been working with sound for a long time now. It’s very embarrassing because, despite the fact that I’ve been working on a sound recording with sound engineers for five years recording the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, I am still inept at a technical level. Every time I am tasked with something simple, just to record something with the Zoom recorder, my recordings are to this day really fallible, to say the least. But I do bring to the team my own expertise, which has more to do with piecing together, with fiction-making. So, okay, we have this mass of recorded sounds. How do we play with them? How do we conceptualize them? How do we give them order and shape and meaning?
So I have been working for at least five years now recording with a team. We have a small collective, the Echoes From The Borderlands, with whom we’ve been recording the sounds of the U.S.-Mexico border. And then more recently, one of the collaborators in that collective, and my partner, who is a sound engineer, and I formed another little creative unit to be able to focus on recording the sounds for Beginning Middle End.
There were many stages in this. First of all, during the years in which I was recording Echoes From The Borderlands, I was also on the side writing Beginning Middle End. So the work that I was doing in sound, I think, at a very deep level, changed the way that I paid attention to things in the world, and therefore how I wrote about them. Beginning Middle End is very much informed by the process through which I gained more listening literacy, which I realized I did not have. I was good at listening to people, because I’ve always been interested in people and their stories and their voices and their gestures. Everything I’ve done always springs from listening to and observing human beings. But I think I was a very poor observer and poor listener of the natural world — I never really gave it much attention. I never found myself really listening to birdsong or really listening to wind. It wasn’t something that my mind was attuned to at all.
It was really thanks to the work in Echoes, and allowing myself to be influenced by my work partners and collaborators who were such incredible listeners. One of them, Leo Heiblum, who has been working with sound his whole life, has been building something called Encyclopedia Sonica — a collection of sound he’s recorded all over the world, from temples in India to a ceremony in Peru, to the Amazon jungle in Brazil to the subway stations in Mexico. He’s been recording sounds for more than thirty years, and he composes music with those sounds. He listens to the world as a musical machine, so to speak, or a musical entity, and his way of listening changed my way of listening.
Anyway, all this to say that the kind of attention I was able to pay to wind and tides and rain and what I would have considered silence or noise, but which is neither silence nor noise, but an actual very precise thing — all of that came into the process of writing Beginning Middle End. It was a very natural step to go from there to then recording with Ricardo Giraldo and with Charles de Montebello. The three of us went to record volcanoes and underwater tides and rain and tempests and fishermen singing and bells and just the whole sonic scape of the places where the novel happens.
Something I really loved about the website is the constellations page, which is just so much fun. The layout of the website actually reminded me of the bit in your book where the narrator is looking at a mosaic and thinks, “What an incredible way to tell a story on the floor, where the middle is the end,” which is such a striking scene. The map on the website made me feel like that, where you can kind of choose where to enter and how to play around with linearity.
I’ve had so much fun seeing [the website]… Really, the website was a very accidental thing. It wasn’t something we had planned to do, but my partner is a professional nerd, and he’s very good at Excel sheets — as professional nerds are. I envy and adore people who are able to organize the world like that. I have a couple of friends who are like that too. I wonder if you’re an Excel kind of person?
Yeah, I am! [laughs]
You look like you would be — not look physically, but the way you ask questions, the way you organize thoughts, I thought that you would be an Excel person too. Well, I’m not, but I really really love working with people who have minds that can do that kind of thing, and so I had asked him if he could just pull up an Excel sheet so we could organize the archive of all the recordings that we had. To just be more organized about it, and so we could share that with other international publishers, so that when they were working on the audiobook, they could follow our path, so to speak. And he was like, “Excel sheet, yeah, I can do an Excel sheet, but maybe I can do it in a better way. Let me just try something out.” And then he just started making this website, and it’s been such a joy to see how one can go from writing and building a universe in words to recording sounds for it, and then giving all of that a visual form of organization that still feels akin to the universe of the novel, but is also something new and something different on its own. I agree, the constellations are really cool. Now that you were saying mosaics, I thought, oh my god, Nirica, you should not speak to him because if you say the word mosaic, he’d probably say, “oh, we need another layer [on the website] that’s a mosaic!” — like, it will be neverending. [laughs]
Something that’s really striking to me in hearing you talk about the process, which I think you can feel in the book, but also it’s so vivid in what you’re saying, is that this feels like such a collaborative book. Within the book also, there’s the way the narrator and her daughter are speaking to each other and co-creating the book in a way. But also all of this stuff that’s coming in around it, with the soundscapes and the website — it’s such an interesting, clear way in which the people that you know and are working with are coming into the book. That’s so cool. There’s a tendency to think of writing as a very singular activity.
I think for me, writing has always been a very collaborative endeavor. I mean, first of all, I have been a mother as long as I’ve been a writer. I was a young mother. I was a mother in my early twenties, so I’ve never been able to not write from [within] the space of motherhood. And I was a grad student when I had my first daughter, so I didn’t have care or nannies or anyone to help. So really I had to find a way to integrate motherhood into working. My daughter, who’s now sixteen and who has been very much a part of all my work my entire life — the first novel I wrote, Faces in the Crowd, was with her by my side, and she was just right there next to the computer, sleeping.
My first proper collaboration with her [was] when she was a little older; I was tasked with a beautiful commission, which was to think of a visual map of something that I was interested in mapping. I thought, well, what can I map that is compatible with my life right now? I thought to map all the swings in all the parks in Harlem, because we lived in Harlem for many years. And so I borrowed a Polaroid camera from a friend so we could document the swings in the parks and have a visual [element]. I spent the next six months going to different parks over and over with my then three-year-old daughter, having her help me take Polaroids of all the swings, put them together, take them again, and the only time I would have to write little notes for this piece was when she was swinging.
And so from then on, the element of collaborating with her, and then more extensively with my family, friends, partners — it has just been a very organic thing. I live in a big, numerous household, so I either work with it or work with it. [laughs]
Something I’m sure you get asked a lot is whether your work is autofiction, which you approach head-on in this book at times. I think there’s just one moment in the book where the characters are named, and I made a note of the names to Google to figure out if the names meant anything — and I was super intrigued to find out it was the name of the fictional writer in Lost Children Archive! What struck me about this, and I think it’s true of all of your writing and this is just one example of it, is there’s such a playfulness you bring to your writing. Even just what we said earlier about the way you’re flirting with the space between fiction and not-fiction, and of boundaries between things. The image that came to mind was like a jigsaw puzzle, but I don’t think it feels like something to be solved, so maybe that’s not the right image — but it’s just knowing that there’s some kind of game happening. How do you think of playfulness like that when you’re writing?
I’ll say that jigsaw puzzles are not a bad image here, because I feel that once I’m deep in the writing of a book, my mind does go into jigsaw mode, because the way I write is so un-linear and not guided by story or plot until much, much later in in the process. But I have to accumulate or build these little pieces first, the little jigsaw pieces, or maybe more akin to this novel, little mosaic pieces — cut them and [piece them together], and they’re irregular, but they’re somewhat eventually compatible. I have to do that for years and years, just accumulating the material itself, and only later comes the fun part for me. Well, [actually, the collecting] is a beautiful part too, because that’s just note-taking, it’s just moments of noticing in the world.
And once that’s there, then play comes in. Okay, now I have all this — how does it all come together? How do I piece it together? What stories emanate from juxtaposing this with this with this with this, and how do I go from here to there? Then I need the vehicle of plot — I have this scene and I have this other scene, and I need to get from here to there. Then plot becomes a consequence of playing around with things, moving them around.
Okay yes, I think what I meant was — I love jigsaws, but maybe I was thinking of that as a process where you have the picture and you’re solving for the picture. You know what you’re building toward. But as a reader, your work is more like a jigsaw puzzle where you don’t have the picture, and only see it when you’re done with it, which is exciting.
Exactly. And imagine being a mosaic worker where you are just given a piece to work on. From what I understand, although it’s very heavily documented, at least not in the sources that I consulted about specifically the Villa Casale in Sicily, there was never a drawn picture underneath the mosaic pieces, but the mosaic workers work directly on the ground with the tessera that they were putting together, not following [a picture]. How — if that is true, what a way to work! And also, it would be a lot of people working at the same time, on different parts, so you wouldn’t know the full picture. You’d be working on a part here, and then eventually everything would emanate.
Your book feels like a very exploratory, curious book — I feel like it’s very comfortable with questions and doesn’t really need answers, which is a space that I really appreciated as a reader. So this is just an idea that came to me while I was reading it — some of that questioning is about the structure of a novel itself, and there’s a moment where the narrator is wondering whether the right way to tell this story is a novel or an essay. And that’s because of the way that an essay is bound by time.
That made me think of this essay by Elisa Gabbert called ‘Infinite Abundance on a Narrow Ledge,’ where she writes about the architecture of an essay, and she thinks about an essay spatially — like a house she’s building. And that in turn then reminded me of the bit in your book where the narrator is talking about how the words for fiction (“plot,” “plan”) are so close to the words for real estate!
This is kind of an open question, so you can respond with anything that comes to mind, but these ideas — of architecture, of the difference between essay and novels — what makes an essay, what makes a novel — I found really interesting. And in those spaces I think your books are quite boundary-breaking, very fluid.
Just to respond to one part of your question — I’ve never really drawn a conclusion from this, but it’s something that baffles me and makes me think that there must be some kind of almost essential difference between the way that we conceive storytelling in Spanish versus in English, and it has to do with the notion of plot itself, which in Spanish has no spatial reference.
The word for plot in Spanish is trama, and the only other meaning that it has is in a loom, when you’re threading, you have a trama and a contra-trama, and the relation between those two things is what creates the fabric, the tissue. So the notion of storytelling in Spanish has much more to do with sewing or threading, which also historically is very linked to talking — because it was during this activity, usually performed by women, that the talking and storytelling would take place, so there was something very, very organically linked in all of that. The word trama then comes out of the loom to also become what gives shape to a story. That makes a lot of sense to me, and I just wonder how that might be so essentially or fundamentally different from the notion of plot being so spatially grounded or spatially bound. A plot is a piece of land. It’s also where you go to die, a cemetery plot. [laughs] It has nothing to do with weaving and story. It’s a very very different notion.
Ah, that’s so interesting. I have learned a lot about words from your book, which is another level of playfulness I really enjoyed.
What other language do you speak, is it Malayalam?
I grew up in Chennai, so Tamil.
What’s the Tamil word for plot?
You know, I have no idea.
Well, it’ll be interesting to compare.
Yeah, this is something I will have to immediately go look up! That’s so interesting, how those differences bring up different connections and associations.
Another thing I’ve noted from Beginning Middle End was that it really made me want to read a lot more classics. That was such a takeaway for me. There’s a lovely section in the book with a paragraph about all the things that classics are and can allow — my favorite was “A Classic is a long corridor,” which is just a phrase that I really love. On your Between the Covers podcast, something that stayed with me was a bit where you talk about reading demanding time and attention, and how contention is also a valid and important way of reading. I was wondering, with regards to the classics that populate this book, what do they mean to you? How did you come to them, and especially Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which this book features so much?
I arrived at Natural History because I was working on Echoes From The Borderlands, and I was realizing for the first time while working on it, as I was telling you at the beginning, that I just was not a good observer and listener of the natural world. I decided that I needed to educate myself much more thoroughly. I started by reading much more contemporary sources about deep time or geology or sea exploration, nonfiction essayistic books, most of them contemporary.
And, with a few exceptions — one of them being the amazing Rachel Carson, who writes so beautifully and with such an immensity of gaze about the sea — my experience of contemporary writing around the natural world was very unsatisfactory. I think what made me often frustrated was a sense of this very big human narrator who was placing always themselves at the center of a great adventure — a very bizarre way of seeing nature from the point of view of the adventurer. I don’t know, it irritated me, I guess.
So I turned my eyes toward other sources. I started with Seneca’s Natural Questions, and I loved it very much, but it wasn’t quite what I was looking for. So I just continued my way, burrowing through books, and somehow I arrived at Pliny. Somehow — just following a path, not knowing exactly where I was going, and there, I was, like, “What is this? And why has no one ever told me that existed? And why have I never read it?!” I studied philosophy in UNAM in Mexico, which has an incredible program in philosophy, and I feel very lucky that I was able to go to a public university in my country that is able to educate so many people so well for free, and I came out very well-trained as a reader. However, no one read Natural History. No one read Pliny in philosophy. But I think that Pliny is also not read if you’re a scholar of literature, and also Pliny is not read if you’re a scholar of science, which would be the other [place he would be read]. He’s kind of fallen into a kind of no-place.
So Pliny is a blind spot everywhere, and I became very, very interested in his way of thinking about nature, organizing it. He has a very beautiful combination of being a good observer of nature, but also a very ethical collector of other people’s observations. He’s one of the first writers in history to cite his references, and so after each of his sections, he’ll cite every source of work he’s taken observations of elements of nature where he’s not been able to go witness things directly, empirically.
Book 2 especially… I have all the Pliny books here, there’s 37 volumes, and a lot of them are incredibly boring. [laughs] But he very generously tells his readers in a prologue that Natural History is not a book that one has to read entirely. It’s a book for using. So if you are an agriculturer, if you’re a farmer, you can consult his volume on agriculture. And if you are a doctor, you can consult his volume on plants as medicine, and so on and so forth. And for me, Book 2 is a book that everyone interested in life on the planet should have access to, because it’s just a beautiful observation of everything around us.
Yeah, I will for sure be reading that!
This is my last question — it’s another thing that intrigued me in your book. There were many times where something happened, or I read a phrase, and I went, “Oh, that sounds so familiar,” and I realized it sounded familiar because it was from earlier in the book. And this happens to the narrator herself a few times. The one that really struck me (mild spoilers) was when a character in the second half of the novel echoes the narrator’s grandmother’s words, “Always there can be more,” and I found that very moving.
I love those moments of recurrence, which the book talks about obliquely at times but also explicitly. It happens in life; it’s a lovely thing to read in a book. And because it’s a work of fiction, or even just because it’s a written piece, it’s all done with intention. I was wondering what those recurrences meant to you in writing this book.
That’s a great question. I probably started playing around with that in Lost Children Archive, where I wanted to think of stories that have parallels but are not synchronous. But in Lost Children Archive, I had just started exploring that — the echoes and repetitions in two different planes, how they might connect two different planes, and what that connection is suggesting or not suggesting.
Then, really, when I was working on Echoes From The Borderlands, I started thinking about echoes in a much deeper way — what kind of echoes we were finding in reality, in different areas of the borderlands themselves, and how we could conceptualize echoes, how we could use them to to give structure to this very long piece. Echoes From The Borderlands is a 24 hour sonic essay, it’s a very long piece. If you think about it, this novel in its sonic translation is seven hours. Echoes is 24 hours. It’s very difficult to work with something so big, right? And echoes are also like nodes, moments where things tie together, and then from there spring new meanings. They’re moments where narrative gets tied together. Here, I think they appear as well as ways to connect, not so much things in space, but things in different timeframes.
I was just wondering, while I was reading the book but also as you’re saying this — it’s a movie I love very much, have you seen the film La Chimera?
I adore Alice Rohrwacher! All her work, I adore. That movie came out in 2024, 2023 — I don’t remember exactly — when I was not in the final stages of writing the novel, but nearing the final stages, and it was the best thing that I could have watched in those years. I adore that movie as well.
Sometimes you just find things that feel like they reach the same emotion, and I think that and your book are very closely connected for me. Such a special movie, also such a special book. I am so excited to read it again.
Well, you can listen to it this time! Thank you for your time and your ideas, and it was a very wonderful conversation.
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