- to bear witness to the experience of one
family in the Dominican Diaspora, one American family, in every meaning of
the word, and when you try superhard, as an artist, as a historian, as a
storyteller, as a human being, to bear witness, when you throw your heart
into that effort, people (if you're in the right place at the right time)
tend to respond. Okay, maybe it's all luck. Still, I'm happy that Drown
continues to move people. It makes all the years of silence and solitude
worth it.

Why did you wait eleven years to publish a second book, which is also
your first novel? Were you concerned about living up to the critical and
popular success of Drown?

I wish I could have written four, five books in the span of those years.
Just couldn't dobut I didn't think she would
take over the way she did. And man, did she almost take over completely. I
ended up dumping hundreds of pages of Beli's story because it was devouring
everything else. She is epic in ways that Oscar can only dream of being;
she's the last survivor from a destroyed family who lives in the wastes of
Santo Domingo as a desperately impoverished orphan until she is rescued,
Dickens style, by a distant aunt. Beli's this young, yearning, beautiful
girl living inside the shadow of this sinister dictatorship. As a result she
is forced to become strong at a fundamental level, strong in the way only
women tend to be. Beli as a character turned into a tribute to an entire
generation of women I grew up with (my mother, her sisters, my