Can You Just Trust That We’re Human: The Millions Interviews Natalia Sylvester
“They were married on the Day of the Dead, el Día de los Muertos, which no one gave much thought to in all the months of planning, until the bride’s deceased father-in-law showed up in the car following the ceremony.” So begins Natalia Sylvester’s new novel, Everyone Knows You Go Home, whose premise involves the firm rule that the deceased father-in-law, Omar, will only appear one day a year. Those regular appearances give the novel structure but also presented a problem: how to portray a world that had only a touch of the supernatural?
It was a craft challenge that took on a moral dimension. Sylvester had to find a tone and approach that honored the natural intrigue of the premise and opening sentence but that also portrayed it as a natural occurrence in the novel’s world and not an exotic caricature of a real cultural tradition.
But it wasn’t only the spirits that risked being exotified. Because many of the characters are immigrants, Sylvester was writing into established narrative expectations, not only for fiction but journalism as well, for what might happen to them: through overwhelming difficulty and suffering, desperate people struggle to reach their goal. The focus is on the terrible things that happen to them (encounters with cartels, coyotes, and ICE agents), and this novel certainly has those elements. But Sylvester didn’t want her novel to frame her characters’ lives around them.
She wanted to tell a different narrative. An immigration story isn’t only a story of crossing a border, she said. It’s a story about everything that happens afterward, of making a new home.
How did you figure out the direction
