“But I started writing professionally in Spanish.” Still the years in the United States have added up. I learned how to write in English, in school,” referring to her childhood abroad. Speaking and writing in English, Luiselli explains, “is not a new thing. Luiselli wrote The Story of My Teeth in Spanish (it was translated into English by Christina MacSweeney) Tell Me How It Ends was composed in English. “The more complex layer is the linguistic one,” she adds. Mexico felt more like home when her last book, The Story of My Teeth, came out in 2015. “I’ve lived longer here than in Mexico,” she reflects. Born in Mexico City, she spent a childhood around the world: in South Korea, then South Africa, India, France, Spain. Author of five books in English (some translated, some not), Luiselli, at 33 years old, has lived in New York for almost a decade.
“It changes, you know, why you stay.” Luiselli says. It’s also the first question I ask her, in a vegan restaurant in Manhattan, as we sit down for lunch. Luiselli’s introductory question, after all, is the same as the intake form she uses to interview unaccompanied children who arrive in the United States from other countries-children seeking status as refugees.
It’s short-the paperback runs to about 100 pages-and could not be more timely. “Why did you come to the United States?” This is the question that opens and closes Valeria Luiselli’s urgent new book, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, expanded from a piece first published in 2016 in Freeman’s magazine.
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