The Painful Beauty of Being Alive

“When I came to the US from the Dominican Republic, I thought I had to choose: either I’m a Dominican or an American,” says writer Julia Alvarez. “I couldn’t deny one or the other, so I felt divided. I’ve been lucky in that I’ve realized it’s not either/or. I live in the space of these two worlds coming together in me, a space where I can be fuller.” Born in 1950, Alvarez lived in the Dominican Republic for ten years until her family had to flee because of her father’s opposition to the Trujillo dictatorship. In her work, Alvarez explores identity and living between cultures, looking at how we find meaning as we navigate endings, transitions, and new beginnings. 

One of America’s most prolific and celebrated Latina authors, Alvarez writes poetry, nonfiction, YA, and children’s books. Her novels include How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, and her latest, The Cemetery of Untold Stories, which is about a writer, Alma, who’s lived in the United States for years and returns to the Dominican Republic to bury the manuscripts she hasn’t been able to finish. Alvarez is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the National Medal of Arts from President Obama, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Hispanic Heritage Award, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. On September 17, PBS premiered “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined,” an American Masters documentary chronicling how Alvarez “burst onto the literary scene and blazed a trail for a generation of Latino authors.” In the film, poet Elizabeth Acevedo says that Alvarez is “among the pioneers in creating a new literature that expanded the meaning of the ‘American Mainstream’ and reminds us of the famous line by Langston Hughes: I, too, sing America.”  

From her home in Vermont, Alvarez spoke with me about living in the liminal space between the US and the Dominican Republic, her journey through the bardo of a health crisis, and how she’s making peace with the stories she hasn’t been able to tell. 

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In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, Alma goes back to the Dominican Republic, which she still thinks of as home. You left the Dominican Republic as a girl and have lived for a long time in the States. Do you feel like you’re between the DR and the US? I go back to the DR every year and spend at least two months. It has a pull at the cellular level. I land at the airport and my body knows the smells; I have an intuitive understanding of how the air feels on my skin. I feel like a little plant put back in its habitat, with a deep root system. I see an expression on a face and know what it means, whereas in the States, I’m still somewhat translating. At the same time, I’m at home in the US, where I have family—my husband, my stepdaughters, my grandchildren—and have lived for sixty-four years! 

You’ve written about feeling a great sense of loss when you left the DR. Do you still feel that way? I do. And I understand it better now, because I have more vocabulary for the trauma I experienced. As a refugee and a kid, I didn’t understand what was happening when I saw the adults who were my bulwarks falling apart and terrified, and everything lost in the blink of an eye. 

My first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, is about how you gain something and you lose something when you leave your homeland. A light way of saying it is that the García girls lost their accents, but they also gained autonomy, freedom, and self-definition—things that, as females in 1950s Dominican culture, they wouldn’t have had the opportunity for. The way life is shot through with loss and gain is the painful beauty of being alive, and part of what sends me to the page is to articulate that.

Your journey through a health crisis is giving you a deeper understanding of the painful beauty of life. What has this process been like? I woke up one morning in 2021 and couldn’t see out of my right eye. It was like palm branches tumbling down inside the eye and then it went all black. I’d suffered a retinal detachment and had to undergo two major surgeries, each of them five hours of excruciating pain. Afterward, I was put in a contraption for eight days, face down, with a little slot to feed myself. At night, in bed, there was a brace for me to put my head in. 

The surgeries weren’t successful, so I lost vision in my eye and have been learning how to live with a disability. I have the camouflage of normalcy—it looks like I’m fine. But I’ve lost depth perception, I don’t drive, I’ve broken a bunch of things. It’s a different world that I’m living in, and I’m still not sure what it means. For a while, all I could talk about was what had happened to me. And then someone told me about something challenging that they were dealing with, and I thought, “Oh, we’re all going through our own struggles.” I suddenly felt compassion, such compassion. It’s a privileged position to think, “Why me?” Because it’s, ‘Why all of us?’ 

When the life we’ve known ends, we’re often in denial because we don’t want to let go of our old existence. Have you found it hard to accept losing vision in your eye? My first response when I woke up that morning was puzzlement, followed by curiosity: “What happens now?” There was a kind of release in that. Of course, as everything unfolded, I felt terror and fear. But I was enduring, not denying.

No one expected me to come back from this experience and continue writing, not even me. But then a doctor acquaintance said something, well, eye-opening: “Your eye isn’t going to get better, Julia, but you will.” That became my mantra. It was a string in the labyrinth, leading to a larger place. I lose the string all the time, and I get annoyed with myself and frustrated with the things I can’t do, but the string of words she gave me is still there. 

Legend says the bardo teachings were hidden in the 8th century, to be discovered in the future when they were most needed. One way of understanding this is that there are things we know that become available to us when we need them most. Has losing vision in your eye revealed fresh perspectives? I think it has. As a Latina, I’m often asked to articulate my identity. But now I want to shed identities, strip away the extraneous. This new perspective is helping me as a writer. So much of the writing business is about celebrity and self-promotion, all of which is contrary to how I experience my writing practice now. My studio is downstairs, and I don’t put any awards or any of my published books there. It’s the barest room in the house, because when I’m in it, I want to have that Zen beginner’s mind, to be surprised by what I discover.

I experience such relief and joy when I feel like I’m touching down on my core self. On a card above my desk is the Mayan weavers’ prayer. When the weavers kneel at their loom to weave, they don’t have a pattern. Everything is variable, depending on the weather and the atmosphere, the fibers and the dyes. The weavers pray, “Grant me the intelligence and the patience to find the true pattern.” There’s craft, there’s intelligence, but you need the patience to not be seduced by what someone else thinks should be your pattern, or what’s selling. That’s the practice.

In The Cemetery of Untold Stories, one of the characters asks, “What happens when a writer leaves the gated community of her established craft and instead goes feral?” Are you going outside the gates now with your creative work? I am, because I’m not interested in repeating the tropes that I feel comfortable in. I’m reading a lot of writers from other cultures in translation, because I’m more interested in how other writers portray, or see, reality than in the landscape I’ve already traveled. I want to move into uncharted terrain, which is why I love poetry. Poetry is the scouts that go out to explore the unknown. And then the prose comes in, which is the families, and they need a town, a school, a place to buy food. It’s all the beautiful clutter of life. Right now, I’m working on a book of poems because I like more and more to move into the wilderness and mystery. 

Bardo is about how our past influences us in the present. As you venture out into unknown regions, to what extent do you feel connected to your past, either your family’s past or the DR’s past? My stories, the way I hear language, all come from my family and country, but I think of them as evolving and growing in a larger family story and landscape that I’m also part of. It’s like what T. S. Eliot wrote in Four Quartets:

“We die with the dying: 
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.”

This relationship between the personal and the collective, between us as individuals and as part of humanity, seems to lie at the heart of The Cemetery of Untold Stories. Yes, because one thing I wanted to write about in this novel is aging and the creative life. As you get older, there are so many layers and so much richness. How do you do justice to it all? How do you have that complexity reflected in your writing? You see it, but the irony is that you have diminishing energies and executive functions. So I wanted to create a space where I could make peace with what I haven’t been able to put my arms around in a story. There are characters that are haunting me. I can hear them saying, “You spent two years on me, you researched me, you asked me a zillion questions. So when is the novel going to be published?” How do you come to terms with that? The way I have is that I don’t feel it’s, “Après moi, le silence.” It’s, “Après moi, other storytellers.” It’s not that I, with my name on it, have to get the stories told. The stories, the storytellers will continue.