Francisco Goldman
‘Nobody Is Really Half This, Half That’: Francisco Goldman on Writing About Mixed Identities
The author of "Monkey Boy" speaks with Alma about how his Jewish and Guatemalan heritage has influenced his writing over the years.
“As a rule, if you try to explain what a good novel is about, you really shouldn’t be able to succeed, unless you recite the whole novel out loud from beginning to end,” Francisco Goldman explains to me over e-mail. “Every novel is written as a search for itself.”
Goldman continues, “It may begin rooted in a familiar reality, but then, if it’s going to be worth spending so much time with, for the writer and eventually for the reader, it leaves that reality behind. It’s partly a search for a voice, a style, a structure, a system or pattern that weaves perhaps mysterious or intuited meanings; in this novel, I worked hard to create a way to move in time, synthesizing a half century of life into the story of a five-day trip home to Boston.”
Goldman’s new autobiographical novel is a good novel by all definitions — and hard to explain, but I’ll try to give you just a taste: “Monkey Boy” is the tale of Francisco Goldberg, a man with a Jewish father and a Guatemalan Catholic mother, very similar to Francisco Goldman himself. Goldberg is returning home to Boston to visit his mother in a nursing home, and the book is set over that short journey — which brings up reflections on his past, on love, and on his complicated identity.
Goldman’s biography is similar to the fictional Goldberg’s: He was born in 1954 in Boston to a Jewish father and a Guatemalan Catholic mother, and began his career covering wars in Central America in the 1980s. He’s written four novels and two books of nonfiction, including “The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop?,” an account of the assassination of Guatemalan Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi Conedera. His last novel, “Say Her Name,” was an acclaimed and moving tribute to his deceased wife, Aura Estrada, a writer who died tragically in a surfing accident in 2007. In 2008, Goldman established The Aura Estrada Prize. He has received a Cullman Center Fellowship, a Guggenheim, a Berlin Prize, and so much more. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, the New York Times, the Believer, and numerous other publications.
Over e-mail, we spoke about what it means to be Jewish and Catholic and Guatemalan and Mexican and American, on the impulse to write autobiographical fiction, and how no one person can be “half” something.
