I love the word novel, like new, strange, unusual. There are a lot of hyperbolic statements in the novel, right? As soon as I wrote, “I can’t write fiction” — I wrote it laughing — it stopped being true. I learned how to write fiction while writing Exquisite Mariposa. There are sections that are journalistic — “on the record,” I used a tape recorder, fact-checked — there are sections that are diaristic, there’s memoir, fantasy and there are more traditionally fictitious passages. 

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