This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, whose debut novel, Catalina, is out today from One World. In this voice-driven tale that begins in 2010, a Harvard University senior named Catalina faces graduation with a feeling of mounting dread that surpasses the usual anxieties about growing up: Raised in Ecuador until the age of five then sent to live in New York City with her grandparents, Catalina is undocumented, and it is two years before the administration of President Barack Obama will offer special rights to children who were brought to the United States when they were children. That means Catalina will be unable to work legally in the country after she departs the Ivy League, and she has no idea how—or where—her future will unfold. Meanwhile she mingles with the offspring of the nation’s elite on campus, learning the styles, codes, and modes of being a member of the upper class. The ringleader of a monied circus, she takes the reader through these exclusive spaces, marveling at the world in which she simultaneously belongs and is absurdly separate. When she embarks on a romance with a Harvard classmate who studies anthropology, she finds herself in the strange position of learning about her own culture through the troubling lens of an outsider’s eyes—all while managing a façade of calm to mask her internal chaos. Booklist praises the novel, calling its narrator “irreverent and often laugh-out-loud funny.... Catalina demands her due from friends, lovers, professors, and familia in Cornejo Villavicencio’s bravura bildungsroman.” Karla Cornejo Villavicencio is the author of The Undocumented Americans (One World, 2021), a National Book Awards finalist in nonfiction. Her writing, which focuses on race, culture, and immigration, has appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Vogue, Elle, n+1, and elsewhere.
Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, author of Catalina. (Credit: Talya Zemach-Bersin)
1. How long did it take you to write Catalina?
There were many false starts and many bad drafts over four years. I wrote the bulk of this version in the middle of the night over the course of a summer.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
This was my first time writing a novel, so I had to teach myself how. I put together a little curriculum for myself: college lectures, screenwriting videos, Paris Review interviews. I studied the dialogue from The Corrections.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write when I have something to say, and I publish when someone is willing to pay me for it. I am no longer precious about where I write. I write wherever. Bed, couch, desk, table, train, plane, boat, moat, etcetera. My back just needs to be to the wall.
4. What are you reading right now?
I won’t tell you what I’m reading right now, but the last book I finished was The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence by Susie Linfield.
5. Which author or authors have been influential for you, in your writing of this book in particular or as a writer in general?
I was born in the shadow of Gabriel García Márquez and I will die in the shadow of Gabriel García Márquez.
6. What is one thing that surprised you during the writing of Catalina?
I wanted to write a book that had the potential to both delight and terrify Philip Roth, and I was very sad when he passed away while I was writing Catalina. I think he would have really liked her. My lil Newark boy.
7. What is one thing your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
I was in need of some attention, and my editor was ignoring me, so I texted him, “Who is smarter, me or Masha Gessen?” He was suddenly available and responded immediately. His answer was exactly what you think it is.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Catalina, what would you say?
I would tell myself to not go off my medications for several months.
9. What forms of work, other than writing, did you have to do to complete this book?
I begged my publisher to let me read the audiobook for Catalina, and they listened to their better angels and said yes. So I recorded the book over a few days at a studio in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. Now I can’t get enough of showbiz.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
Use an outline—it’s the editor’s plea, and they’re right each time. The best spiritual advice I’ve received is to avoid writing for an imagined white audience that may or may not exist and whose minds I cannot read and whose hearts it is not my job to change. Just write, you know?
