Marie Arana and Writing Between Reality and Imagination

Sign up for the Goings On newsletter to receive their selections, and other cultural recommendations, in your inbox.The Peruvian American writer Marie Arana has authored a wide range of books: “American Chica,” a memoir about straddling cultures; “Lima Nights,” a novel about an extramarital affair; “Bolívar,” a biography of the soldier and statesman Simón Bolívar; and “LatinoLand,” her celebrated study of Hispanic America. Her latest project, a novel, represents a return to fiction after writing three hefty works of nonfiction. Although it’s based in part on reality, the book is also, of course, an invention. Not long ago, she talked to us about a few of the works she has turned to while in the process of stitching reality into fiction. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

When I got to Chapter 4 of my new book, I put my pen down and started to think about what I’m doing—what the actual, white-hot center of it is. For inspiration, I went back to Mario Vargas Llosa. Up until he died, last year, he was a very good friend of mine—we went to the opera together, we went to movies together, we had dinner together. I got to interview him on several stages. So one thing I went back to read was his Nobel Prize speech, where he talks about the idea of a daydream that eventually germinates into a book.

Then I went back and reread his first novel. It’s funny—in English, it’s called “The Time of the Hero,” but in Spanish it’s called “La Ciudad y Los Perros,” or “The City and the Dogs,” which is so much more vivid, and has nothing to do with the English title. To collapse the story line a little bit, the novel is about a character who, like Vargas Llosa himself, grows up thinking that his father has died. But when he gets a little older, he learns that his father is actually alive—his mother lied because divorce was such a horrible thing in Peru. Then his mother and father decide to reunite. After this, the boy and his mother move to Lima, where the father sends him to a military academy, in an attempt to beat the wimpy artist out of him. It’s a vicious place of violence and bullying and sexual abuse, where young men learn to be autocratic. One character’s escape is ghostwriting love letters and pornographic stories to entertain his classmates. It’s been such an inspiration to me, to see the way that the writer suspends himself between those two worlds, and how writing becomes his salvation.