BUT DO YOU LOVE ME WITH LOCURA? follows a woman struggling with her career and failed relationship who visits Mexico and meets a doctor who is also struggling with life.  What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

There was a coming together of many elements, but my moving to Mexico in 1990 was the main set-up. I wasn’t a journalist as Rosie is, but new and often confusing wonders popped into my life daily. I often saw things that didn’t seem to go together, to fit, but there they were, and they somehow worked. So utter fascination was part of the setup.

People who move to another country often re-invent themselves there or bring to the foreground aspects of themselves that have been in the background. I saw that taking place around me. I am intrigued by how and why this reinventing happens. My characters who change countries do not re-cast themselves exactly, but they do find their identities wobbling all over the place.

What were the morals you were trying to capture while creating your characters?

Morals? I didn’t think about morals at all. I was just aiming to tell a story—or in this novel, four stories, given that the story is told through the eyes of four characters: Rosie the journalist; her mother the artist; Dr. Juan Ramón; his father, the orphan who became a self-made man. I did think about my characters’ values, which you could say are closely related to morals.

One thing I explored was the keeping of secrets. Each of these four main characters has a secret at some time in the story. The secrets eventually cause problems, partly because the very act of withholding, of keeping something hidden, implies not having come to terms with an aspect of oneself but also not trusting others. Secrets siphon off energy and can keep a person stuck.

A related value is the willingness to change. Each of the four characters is off balance in old mud, the dried, deep grooves in the road. The characters have to realize that their habitual ways no longer serve them and be willing to risk something different.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

One theme is the enormous pull of family. Along with the pull of familiarity and comfort come duty and responsibility. Certainly Rosie feels a sense of duty toward her mother, all the more so because Rosie is an only child.  If not her, then who? Yet there’s a desire to escape the expectations and pressure that family exerts, sometimes unknowingly, just by its existence. One’s culture does the same thing.  Both Rosie and Juan Ramón struggle with that desire to escape.

Another theme focuses on what happens when someone loses control. No, I should use another word than “loses” because it sounds accidental, like, “oh, whoops. I mislaid my control.”  Instead, what happens when someone voluntarily surrenders control? What happens when someone consciously stops acting as though there is only one right and perfect way to be or do or have an outcome?

We might as well let go of our effort at control because we rarely can assess the full picture anyway. There’s always an underpainting that we probably don’t detect. We see from only a narrow angle. One way this “not knowing” is reflected in the book is through language and its subtext. Any English speaker who has tried to learn a foreign language has probably struggled to learn its subjunctive mode, its “what if” forms that suggest doubts and uncertainty and wishes. The Spanish language uses the subjunctive mode far more than English, adding to Rosie’s feeling early on of always walking on unsteady ground.

What is the next book that you are working on and when will it be available?

The next book is also set in Mexico, but in a different region than this current novel. Like BUT DO YOU LOVE ME WITH LOCURA? it explores family dynamics. It will also feature betrayal and the sense that things are not as they seem. There will be a murder—or does it just look like a murder?  There is a ghost. Alcohol will be involved. It’s an ongoing project, so I don’t know yet when the book will be finished.

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Original source: https://literarytitan.com/2023/05/26/the-keeping-of-secrets/