Valeria Luiselli : Memory, Fiction, and Reality

Valeria Luiselli's literary voice resonates with a rare intensity that comes from inhabiting multiple worlds. Born in Mexico but raised across continents—from South Korea to South Africa, India to Spain—she crafts stories that blur boundaries between reality and fiction, memory and imagination.

In this conversation, Luiselli shares the intricate details of her six-year journey creating her forthcoming novel "Beginning Middle End," which explores how stories shape our perception of reality through a mother-daughter relationship. With remarkable vulnerability, she reveals her writing process—rising at 5 AM to write by hand, starting with atmospheric feelings rather than plots, and collaborating with her teenage daughter to authentically capture a child's perspective.

What makes Luiselli truly revolutionary is her multisensory approach to storytelling. For five years, she's been recording the entire Mexico-US border with sound engineers, creating what she calls "a 24-hour sonic essay" capturing everything from underwater whale songs to children interviewing rivers. This ambitious project reflects her belief that different mediums allow us to experience stories in complementary ways—her novels existing simultaneously as text, sound, and sometimes visual archives.

Luiselli's perspective on fiction challenges conventional thinking: "Fiction is not the opposite of truth," she explains, tracing the word to its Latin root fingere—"to mold something out of clay, to give shape to something already there." This philosophy illuminates why her work feels so alive; she's not inventing from nothing but sculpting meaning from the raw materials of existence.

The conversation culminates in a profound reflection on narrative's power in our lives. "The value we give to our lives is determined by the way we tell the story of ourselves to ourselves," Luiselli observes. In her hands, storytelling becomes more than art—it's a way of making sense of our existence, of anchoring ourselves in an increasingly unmoored world.

Dive into this episode to discover how one of literature's most innovative voices creates work that resonates with both intellectual depth and emotional truth. Then explore Luiselli's books to experience her singular vision firsthand.