And the novel is full of characters like this, people who don’t see their own privilege or racism or power and dangerously/violently live in their own mythologies instead. But in many ways, she is more the stories she doesn’t know or understand than her own story about herself. Jeanette doesn’t know the backstory of her ancestors, doesn’t know all the backstory of the people who come into her life, doesn’t actively think of all the historical and political forces that shape who she is in the world and the actions she ultimately takes. And I wondered what it would be like to tell a character’s story through some of the stories she doesn’t see. We are born into a story about ourselves, and mythologies that are passed on to us by our families, by society, by the other stories we consume.

Gabriela Garcia: You’re right about the way we understand ourselves through story. What were you exploring about the idea of family through the book’s structure? I chatted with Garcia over email about how endemic racism shapes both the carceral and immigration systems, the racial and class divisions of Florida, and why timeliness is a false label for novels about immigration.Ĭhristopher Gonzalez: Sometimes I think that all families really leave us or pass down to us are their stories-the stories we’ve told ourselves based on those stories, and the messy larger narratives patched together from what is lost in between. With lyrical prose and haunting storytelling, Garcia explores the lives of five generations of Cuban women and a mother-daughter pair from El Salvador who are all impacted by immigration policies, political violence, and the intersection of class, race, and oppression.

But there are also the stories she doesn’t know. Miami is awash with memories of clubbing, department store jobs, her fraught relationship with her mother. In another, she travels to Cuba to search for clues about her family and the painful history her mother cannot share.

In one, she must decide what to do when ICE takes her neighbor in a raid, leaving behind the woman’s daughter, Ana. It’s these stories that shape the novel, and Jeanette’s life.

Of women and salt review