Alejandro Heredia is the author of Loca. His Insight essay “White Girls Were (not) Us” was published in The Offing on January 26, 2023. Editor-in-Chief Mimi Wong conducted the Q&A. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
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Mimi Wong: Thank you so much for joining us at The Offing to talk about your new debut novel, Loca. I just finished reading it. I’m so excited to be able to ask you questions firsthand. But before we dive in, I want to rewind. I was rereading the essay that you published with The Offing back in 2023 called “White Girls Were (not) Us.” I was really excited when you pitched this idea initially. I was a very avid Sex and the City fan. It felt so formative to my adolescence and young adulthood. Even though we come from different backgrounds, I really related to a lot of what you were saying in the essay about back then in the late 1990s, early 2000s, being so desperate looking for representation and finding something worth connecting to in the series, even though it was not necessarily for or about people like us. What was it that drew you in?
Alejandro Heredia: I grew up talking to my cousin Junior about Sex and the City, and how we would become like these white girls one day who bought nice clothes and had really exciting and fun and also heartbreaking love affairs, and that went out partying and dancing. We just grew up putting so many of our dreams about adulthood, or developing our dreams about adulthood, through the lens of white womanhood as it was being presented in Sex and the City. In the essay, I talk about some of the great things that came out of that, but also some of the shortcomings of having to leap across difference to understand oneself.
MW: I did see some of the overlapping themes. Loca is about young people coming to New York City with their dreams, and what it means to be a young person in the city. When you were writing the novel, how were these themes and ideas percolating in your mind?
AH: Part of what I was trying to do with the novel is that I was just writing all of the dreams and exciting things that happen to those white women in Sex and the City. I thought, why not make a lot of those exciting things happen for these queer people and these people of color and these immigrants that are living in New York?
Sal and Charo, who are the main protagonists of Loca, they go out dancing, and they go to the beach, and they go to places where they might not be welcomed because they are predominantly white spaces. But they go anyway. For example, there’s a scene where they go to the end of Long Island, to Montauk. There are so many episodes in Sex and the City about them going off to the Hamptons. So I wanted to just give that to some of these characters, not suggesting that they could move through the world like the white women in Sex and the City, but suggesting that queer people, immigrants, people of color have dreams and friendships and heartbreaks, and all these complicated things that encompass the human experience just as well as Carrie and Samantha and Miranda.
MW: Would you mind telling us a bit more about the two main characters for readers who haven’t read the novel yet?
AH: Loca is about two best friends, Sal and Charo. At the beginning of the novel, [Sal] is just about to leave for a job interview, when he freezes, and he doesn’t go. The novel follows the back and forth between his life in the Dominican Republic as a young queer person and his life in New York to try to understand what it is about his past life that is stopping him from building a new life in New York.
On the other side, Charo is a young mother. She’s twenty-five. Her baby is almost two years old. She also came to the U.S. at twenty years old with all these dreams about who she would be, and she has found herself five years later falling into a lot of the expectations, or a lot of the roles, that are expected of her in her culture and in her society. She lives for her partner and for her baby, and doesn’t really have a lot of room for herself. And so the novel explores her trying to find a sense of identity in addition to her domestic responsibilities.
MW: How did these characters come to you? Where did they come from?
AH: They came out of questions that I had. My mother was a young immigrant woman who came to New York in the mid-1990s. But my mom lived a very lonely life. Her life was her family. Maybe she had a friend or two, but for the most part she kept to herself. I wanted to ask myself, what would her experience have been like, and what would the experience of immigrant women like her be like if women like my mother had had a group of friends to get them through the difficulties of being a young mom, or the difficulties of being a partner, or the difficulties of just being a person in the world? And so I gave a woman like my mother, a woman like her generation of women, a group of friends to get her through some challenges.
On Sal’s side of things, I was just really curious about what it might have been like to have a queer adolescence in the Dominican Republic. I was born in the Dominican Republic, but I came to this country when I was seven. Also, I was curious about the kinds of conditions that push queer people specifically to leave their homes behind to go somewhere else.
MW: The novel is set in the 1990s. What were the challenges of writing about this past time period?
AH: I was born in the 1990s, but I was not a conscious person in the ‘90s. I had to rely on other people’s experiences to really understand the time period that I was writing about. I grew up hearing stories from my mother and her sisters, and my father and his cousins, and so many people who had lived in the Bronx, specifically from 1995 to 1999. So by the time I sat down to write the novel, I had a well of knowledge already about this time period, just from the stories that I had heard. I didn’t know everything about the ‘90s, but I felt very confident about what I knew about what I call the Dominican Village in the Bronx.
MW: What’s really cool about your novel, and I think what really drew me to it, is that I love a New York City novel. I love reading about young people navigating the city because I think there’s such a rich literary tradition. There’s something really awesome about a writer of color putting your mark on that literary tradition. What works did you see your novel in conversation with?
AH: I am really inspired by writers from a century ago. When I look at writers like Virginia Woolf and how she wrote about London in books like Mrs. Dalloway, or how Claude McKay wrote about Harlem in Home to Harlem, I’m just really inspired by writers who write about their corner of their cities and do it in a way that even a hundred years later somebody is able to connect to that place. I was also inspired by Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and NW. I think that her writing and her books gave me permission to be able to write about a corner of a city that people [may] think that they know well, but that they don’t know a lot about really.
For me, it was really important to say these are all the things that people think that they know about what it’s like to be a young person in New York, from shows like Broad City or Sex and the City, all these different shows which I love, but which often feature white women or white people or wealthy people. Sometimes it feels to me like you can get through all of these different shows and texts and you might not even know that there are immigrants in this city who keep the city running—that there are people of color and queer people that live and thrive and go through difficulties in New York, specifically in the Bronx.
MW: As you were writing this novel, were there any major revisions or changes that you had to grapple with? Or do you feel like this novel was pretty true to the very original version that you had many, many years ago?
AH: The book took me seven years to write. I think about seventy-five to eighty-five percent of it remained from the first draft in terms of scenes and storylines. As I was revising, one of the main things that I had to do was that I had to give Charo more space on the page. In the first iteration, it was a lot about Sal’s past. I had to flesh out [Charo’s] character more so that the reader is able to understand a decision that she makes at the end of the second part of the novel that feels like a very challenging decision. And it’s a very morally gray decision that she makes.
MW: When you published that essay with us in The Offing, where were you in the process of writing your novel?
AH: By that point, I already had a full draft of the novel. I started writing the book because my cousin, who was really more like my brother, passed away, at the end of 2018. As I was grieving, I had all this energy within me that I was using to destroy myself through some very self-destructive habits and practices. I got to a certain point where I was like, Okay, well, I need to channel this energy into something fruitful, or I’m going to keep going down this road of self-destruction. So I sat down to write the book. The book isn’t about me, or my cousin, or anyone in my life. But I was using some of the energy from that grief to explore some questions that I had about queer Dominicanness and friendship and longing and loss and communal responsibility.
It wasn’t really until I wrote the essay [for The Offing] that I wrote about my own grief specifically. And so it just goes to show that different forms, different genres, at least for me, have different utilities. The process of creating writing fiction felt like a process of creation, and in the midst of really overwhelming grief, I really needed to stop focusing on my own life for a little bit, to be in the world intellectually and creatively. It wasn’t until a few years later, after being in therapy for a while and processing with my own loved ones, that I was able to write about my own life. I was able to exorcise or process some of my own inner demons through that essay. I think there’s a place for each genre, and I like being able to use different forms to explore different sides of what’s in my heart or what’s in my mind.
MW: On the topic of genre, I listened to the podcast you were on, Debutiful, and you were talking about “slice of life,” which I love talking about as a genre. I really latched on to the phrase when I learned that it was a popular genre in manga and anime, which I grew up on. What is your understanding of slice of life as a genre?
AH: I love that genre. I also grew up reading manga and watching anime. Slice of life shows and texts were some of my favorites because it felt like you could be connected to a character over a long period of time. I always really loved that connection to characters emotionally, intellectually, creatively. When I set out to write this book, I really wanted the reader to feel connected to the everyday lived experience of these people. I just wanted to write about the quotidian and the everyday, and slice of life felt like the perfect form to do that through.
MW: It’s really about a character’s journey. A lot of it is internal, and it can be so tricky to land because you have to balance a lot with maybe not a lot of heightened action, but you still have to make the stakes for the characters very real. What were the challenges that you found working through this?
AH: I think that in so many ways a slice of life genre subverts or resists a lot of our narrative expectations. I think that often we are expecting a story to have a beginning, middle, and end, and for there to be a climax, for everything to revolve around that climax at the end of the story. And so part of what I set out to do, especially in the third part of the novel is to write the meandering ways in which people arrive at conclusions, or points that feel like conclusions in their own lives. Both Sal and Charo make big decisions at the end of the novel, but they don’t come through any one particular moment. These decisions come through process, and I wanted to show the reality of that process. Charo gets a journal and she starts journal writing, and that’s something that allows her to arrive at a decision that she makes at the end of the novel. But she also learns to drive, and she also tries new food, and she does all these different things that amassed to her staying at the end of the novel. I can finally make a decision that resists all these expectations that are set upon me. But that is the process.
One of the critiques that I’ve gotten for the novel is that the third part is, it feels like it meanders. But that was done intentionally, and whether the reader appreciates that or not, to me, at least, it reflects the lived experiences of so many people that I know. In a way, that feels more realistic than “Here’s the climax,” and then we’re on the way down again, you know?
MW: Now that you have this book out in the world, and you’ve gotten a chance to hear some feedback, what does that feel like to kind of have people engaging with your novel?
AH: It feels great. It feels incredible. I feel like I am learning about the book as I go, which is really nice, like even this conversation. I don’t think I had the language when I was writing it. Oh, I’m writing a slice-of-life novel. But now in hindsight, it certainly feels that way when I look at what I’ve created. So it’s really clarifying. And it’s really helpful to have feedback from people that appreciate the novel, but also people who find it challenging in some ways, whether I agree with people’s readings or not. That point is sort of moot. It’s just really nice to have that feedback after working on something for seven years.
I will say it’s also been challenging because I think I expected certain readers, certain reviewers to have more intelligent responses to the book, frankly. One way that people keep describing the book is that it’s a book about intersectionality, as if I am a sociologist writing through the lens that Kimberly Crenshaw created in 1989. It’s silly, and it’s reductive. And frankly, it’s racist. It seems to me like it’s the only way that people can talk about or viewers can talk about the writing of queer people of color unless there’s a bunch of white people in it. So that has been clarifying, but also frankly disappointing because I expect intelligent readers. When I’m writing, I’m always thinking the person who picks this book up is going to be as smart as me, or hopefully smarter than I am, and they’ll be able to pick up on all the things that I do right, and also all the things that I do wrong. But to have readers or critics say, “Oh, this is a book about intersectionalities.” Come on, that’s boring and not interesting.
MW: Who is the dream reader that you felt like you’re writing for?
AH: For me, the ideal reader is somebody who can appreciate good sentences. I was thinking I want to push myself to write the best version of this book. I was thinking about a reader who might stop along the way and not be so preoccupied with necessarily where the narrative is going, although I understand that’s important, but somebody who might pick up on the nuances of the sentences. And why this word and not that word? Why is this paragraph so long, or why does in the third part of the novel the form break right? I was writing for the nerdy writers who pay attention to those things, and the nerdy readers who also pay attention to those things.
MW: I have to say, I was in constant awe of the way you write lines, especially your closing lines of chapters. They were always just killer.
There is the work we do as writers just trying to create these stories, to work on our craft, to make this the best work we can, and then we have to bring it into this publishing world and face the realities of marketing and other people chiming in. It becomes about what sells and all that. I’m just curious, given your experience so far, what advice would you give to writers who are going through this right now?
AH: Oh my god, it has been a journey, a spiritual journey, an emotional journey. You know, I was just actually writing about this this morning in my journal because it’s something that I have to continue coming back to as I’m going through this process. I used to tell myself that I would only continue writing books if the world wanted them. So if I get a lot of readers or I get good reviews or whatever it is, and then if the world doesn’t want it, then I’ll just stop doing it, and I’ll just get another job or something. And I think that comes from maybe younger Alejandro, who really liked people in school telling him that he was very smart, that he was really good at writing, and he really needed that affirmation and that validation to keep going.
I’ve come to the realization that even if the world meets my work with total indifference, my relationship to my art cannot be moved by that. I love to write. It is a thing that gives me the most meaning in life. And so, if it is that deep for me, spiritually, intellectually, creatively, then I cannot allow it to be moved by the market, or by a review, or by a lot of readers or no readers or a few readers—whatever it is. That doesn’t mean that I’m not grateful. I’m so grateful for every reader that picks up the book, for every reviewer that takes five minutes of their time to write something on Goodreads or on Instagram. All of that stuff feels really good, and it pushes me to go on. And it’s validating. But there has to be a part of me, and I think there has to be a part of all of us as writers, that is unmoved by all of that, because you just don’t have control over how the world receives you.
If I was to give a piece of advice to a writer who is going through it, or who is about to go through it, I would say, Make sure that your ambitions, your ambitious energy is placed on the art, not necessarily on the author part of it—on the awards, and the lists, and all of that. The thing that you can control is the writing. So put all of your energy and ambition behind that to write a piece of work that you are proud of. I am so proud of having written this book. It is the best book that I could have written in my twenties, and I’m glad that it’s out in the world.
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