Valeria Luiselli: “There are always fingerprints of the archive in my books.”
Conceived by Mary Wang, Miscellaneous Files is a series of virtual studio visits that uses screenshots from writers’ digital devices to understand their practice.
Though Valeria Luiselli has long been hailed a “writer’s writer,” looking through her “miscellaneous files” feels more akin to visiting the studio of a visual artist. This is not only because of the visual and tactile materials she often incorporates into the pages of her books, but because of the way she allows the properties of such raw material to inform the shape of the text. The plant the protagonist finds on a rooftop in Luiselli’s first novel, Faces in the Crowd, was the plant that lived on the author’s desk. Her second novel, The Story of My Teeth, grew out of Luiselli’s collaboration with a group of workers at a juice factory in Mexico City; from New York, she sent them installments of the story and then used the audio recordings of their discussions about them to shape the next step. The legal documents Luiselli collected as an interpreter for Central American child migrants form the backbone of Tell Me How It Ends, a book-length essay structured after the intake questionnaires child migrants receive from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The same documentation on child migrants reappears in her latest novel, Lost Children Archive—along with additional photos, maps, and recordings that Luiselli collected on her travels before she started writing the book, and on those driven by it. Set during a period when America’s treatment of child migrants had—and has—become unconscionable, the book follows a family’s road trip from New York to the US-Mexico border after the parents “made the very common mistake of thinking that marriage was a mode of absolute commonality and a breaking down of all boundaries, instead of understanding it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude.”
But the book is more than a story about a splintering marriage, or a young boy’s description of complex events in the language he shares with his sister, which form the two halves of the narrative. The quotes, is both “the book and an archive of the book,” as Luiselli told me. On Skype from her home in the Bronx, she and I talked about how each of her projects drive their own archival processes, how she writes in “intense dialogue with other books,” and how, having grown up in countries including South Korea, South Africa, and India, she built her own literary canon.
