How to Write Characters’ Interior Lives, with Caro de Robertis

CARO DE ROBERTIS IS an Uruguayan American author and full-tenured professor in the creative writing department at San Francisco State University. Their pronouns are they/theirs. They are the author of five novels and the editor of an award-winning anthology, Radical Hope. Their books have been translated into 17 languages and have received numerous awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Dos Passos Prize for literature. Their new book is The Palace of Eros, just out from Atria Books. Listen in and read along as we discuss how to write characters’ interior lives, and so much more.

Powered by RedCircle

Caro: Thank you so much, Marion. It is a joy to be here with you.

Marion: Well, that’s lovely. It’s a joy for me too. I learned so much reading your work and I’m excited to talk with you about it. Starting with this reality that in the early 1970s there was a brutal military government that took power in Uruguay, your country of origin, and that dictatorship lasted until 1985. Under that government, many aspects of life for brutally curtailed, though queerness was treated as a particularly dangerous transgression.

The title of your absolutely luminous 2020 novel is Cantoras, a somewhat old-fashioned word for “singer” in Spanish. And the word that the real-life women who came out to each other as queer under that dictatorship used as a code for one another. And in this novel, we meet five women and span three decades.

So I want you to talk to me first to lay some pipe here for who you are and how you write and how you think. Talk to me about the intent here, both in terms of educating the world about this time in Uruguay, and how to do so by choosing these characters through which to tell that tale.

Caro: Thank you so much for that incredibly layered question. Cantoras rose up out of years of listening and thinking and dreaming. I didn’t start writing it until I had already been swimming with these real women’s stories for about 15 years.

In 2001, I was in my mid-20s and I went back to Uruguay, my country of origin, really looking for signs of lesbian life. I was in the process of being disowned by my parents for being gay. And in an immigrant family from a very small country, one of the things that I heard was that I couldn’t be gay and Uruguayan at the same time. And that gave me a kind of urgency and hunger to find the stories that would allow me to breathe more fully in the world and see mirrors of myself and what is possible for me. Of course, queer people of all forms, queer and trans people, have existed throughout time, but our stories have not always been made visible in every culture, in every historical period, and in every corner of the world.

And so for me, I’m very passionate as a writer about finding those places of silence and then filling those silences with song and with story. It was important to me with these women’s stories. In 2001, I went and I found these women who had lived through the dictatorship, who were a generation older than me, and found ways to come out to each other and build a life. And I was so inspired and amazed, and knowing them and meeting them helped me become more possible in my own skin.

But then, as I started writing, it wasn’t just about Uruguay or Uruguayan queer people or my own personal urgency. I think that as writers, we might begin with a seed that is about our own personal urgency, our hunger to understand something better or to make something visible that has felt invisible in the world around us or in our skin. But ultimately, if we’re really going deep into the work, any particular story we’re wanting to carry into the world is also a deeper story or larger story than us. And hopefully in being able to plumb the depths of the particularity of your story, you’re also touching a place that will be resonant for other people as well.

Marion: That’s a fabulous and generous answer. And the whole idea of finding their silences and writing into them is really reflected beautifully in that book because-

Caro: Thank you.

Marion: … of the quality of the interior lives that you write. This comes up so much. I teach writing classes and people always ask, “How do I show my interior life?” And you’re rather a, well, I would say you’re kind of a wizard at this. So again, in this novel Cantoras, four of the five characters are deeply revealed through backstory, and you in each case bring in those backstories right on time.

Let’s start there. The writers I work with always ask when to jump back and why. So let’s start with the when. How do you know when to give us backstory on anyone?

Caro: That is incredible. I love the thought of wizardry.

Marion: Get a hat, get a big hat.

Caro: All right. Okay. Yeah. Oh my gosh, an interiority wizard. I love that so much. I’d love to think that. I mean, I’m inspired by the wizardry I see in other people’s books.

So I think of Clarice Lispector, the Brazilian writer, as one of the great queens of radical interiority, where she really plumbs the inner lives of characters, sometimes ordinary women, housewives, but they have so much inside them. Of course, Toni Morrison is another incredible master of that interior swim. And so I find myself inspired and moved by books like that, and so that’s the way that I wish to write. Part of it is also polyphony. So bringing in many voices or allowing for a fluid multiplicity of point of view, at least in Cantoras, that was important to me.

One of the approaches that I use in terms of specific strategies in the writing process is to write a scene. When a scene comes forward, the first time it comes out, it might be focused on the dialogue, what it is that wants to happen in the scene, what people need to say to each other, where they are, kind of the general arc of it. But really most fiction is written in layers. We come back through and we see what’s missing, what we got on the page and what still needs to get there, what’s underdeveloped.

And so interiority and plunges into memory and backstory within the person while the scene is happening, are things that I layer in in later revisions.

Marion: That’s helpful. And yes, I think beginning writers don’t understand about the layering. I was trained at The New York Times where it’s not about the first draft, it’s about the rewrite. You get it right, you get it right, you get it factually correct, but then you quickly rewrite it. And the luxury of writing books of course is that you have a lot more time. But we all know it’s in the rewrite. And the ability to get it in this wonderful form of writing, to get this layer stuff in there, in there, in there. So I love that.

And so healing and acts of witness are a big part of Cantoras. In memoir we know that the character writing the tale is in a transcendent journey, since that is what memoir requires, we know that the writer themselves has healed from something, has changed, has transcended something. But how about for fiction? Can you write about healing without having been on a healing journey oneself?

Caro: I mean, I think in fiction we absolutely create characters that may have very different experiences from our own. So we may not always know directly what it is to live through precisely that experience. For myself, I’m someone who was born during the Uruguayan dictatorship so I’ll never know exactly what it was like to live through some of that repression. I have to imagine my way in.

At the same time, we do use the raw material of our lived experience. And I think that there is often within us as writers, a hard-won healing or journey that we’ve taken towards the possibilities of our belonging in the world or our feeling whole that we do draw on to shape the characters who are in very different situations.

I mean, and with the new book, The Palace of Eros, it takes place over 2000 years ago in Ancient Greece. It’s a retelling of an ancient Greek myth. Of course I don’t know exactly what it’s like to be those people, but when we wildly imagine our way in, it is a kind of blend of deep research, which is something I personally am very committed to as a writer, and this folding in of what we know from our own inner emotional and spiritual landscape. We draw on that as a resource too.

Marion: Yes, we do. So let’s talk about The Palace of Eros. It’s just a delightful read. It’s beautiful. What fascinated me right from the start is that Greek myths, well, they were originally transmitted by singers as far back as the 18th century BCE. We know that around 700 BCE, the poet Hesiod’s Theogeny offered the first written version of Greek mythology. We kind of know that Greek and Roman mythology got absorbed and now we think of it as classical mythology. And while all of that is a wild reduction of all this oral and then written tradition.

For our purposes today, we should all pause for a moment and bow our heads to consider the endurance and pervasiveness of these myths. Because most of us in 2024 know something of them, even if our only reference is Cupid’s portrayal in cartoons. We know something and they endure. And recently there’s been a score of books in which the telling has gotten an update. Maybe Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles is the most well-known of these recent books. But I see this subgenre a lot and I admit I love it. And in your case, in this new literally beautiful book, The Palace of Eros, you tell a story of Eros and Psyche.

But my question is, or do you retell it? In other words, since this is a myth, is there any real ownership of these tales or are they just available to all of us to make of them what we need in this day and age?

Caro: That’s an excellent question. And I think to me, they are available to all of us, And they are in fact part of the fabric of our collective understanding and our collective repository of stories and myths. As you said, it shows up in cartoons, it shows up in pop culture in all of these different ways.

And I’m a Latin American writer, a Latinx writer, and my first five novels are all set in Latin America. But Latin America is also a place where Greek myths are very much alive in people’s understanding and people’s inheritance, even if they are not quintessentially Latin American. I grew up reading these myths and I was quietly obsessed with The Palace of Eros since I was in college. I mean, I would say about 25 years before I wrote this book.

I think it’s really marvelous for us, as writers, to be free to be in our reverie and our dreaming. And sometimes there is something about taking something that is already in our fabric of stories and imagining it in a different way.

Marion: Yes. So let’s drill into that a little bit. And you’re telling, Eros is the non-binary deity of desire. Was Eros always non-binary or did you merely report that, or has Eros, like so many of our historic characters or mythological characters, been prey to whomever anyone needs Eros to be, a straight white male for instance. Or is the history of it far more complex than that? I mean, what is it that you were able to go in and say, “Well, I think this is who this is.”

Caro: Yeah, so the myth of Psyche and Eros, which is what I am working with and retelling in this book, the first known recorded version of it is in Apollonius’ The Golden Ass. So it’s been a long time since it’s been part of our recorded knowledge, but of course, Eros also shows up in Ovid’s Metamorphoses quite extensively. There are many stories about him, in that case, it’s the God of desire and of love, Aphrodite’s child.

And so within that context, Eros is male. But when I step back, I think why wouldn’t Eros, the God of desire and love, be a non-binary, genderqueer, lesbian goddess? And if I centered that understanding and possibility, what would happen to the story? And that’s what really ignited the project for me.

So I think that often, especially with novels which are a large fictional world, it may be different with short stories, but the dynamic with a novel is I think very often they can start with burning questions. They can start with a what if. And it’s the what if and the curiosity and wonder that we bring to that, what if that gives us the material to start creating that world, and honestly, the fuel to stay engaged with that world for a matter of years, because it takes years to write a novel. So we need to be fascinated with what’s going to unfold as we keep coming back to the page for this joyful but serious labor over so much time. It’s a lot of work.

So for me, what if was like, what if in this story, where this deity Eros is in love with this mortal woman Psyche, but they can only meet together in the dark, in a dark room, hidden from both the divine world and the human world because they’re coming together as transgressive. If it’s a queer relationship, all of these thematic layers just unfurl and open up for me. And then I really wanted to know what it would mean and what was going to happen.

Marion: It’s a great answer, and it allows us to go and have a look. One of the things I love about what’s going on in the world right now, not all over the world, and not even in every state in this country, let’s just put some parameters around this, but in popular culture, is the look we’re having again at some of the people in history that we needed to have be a certain way at a certain time. I always think of Emily Dickinson. She was this virginal, white dressed, she was a nature poet for a while. It’s like, “Well, no. She’s undeniably our at least second-greatest Civil War poet.” And we made her out to be this thing. And now we’re looking at her again, thank God, and with the eyes that we have, with the educated eyes we have.

So it’s not surprising that for thousands of years we’ve gone back to the myths and had another look. They are after all magnificent in their prototype, in their behavior, in their rages, in their powers and all of this. But what about you? What do you think makes them inexhaustible, these myths, that we can keep going to them? Every time I read just my basic high school Edith Hamilton mythology book, which I still have next to the bed-

Caro: Oh, wow.

Marion: … I’m delighted. And I’d love you to explain why.

Caro: I mean, that’s a good question, what is the why? And I don’t know. I mean, I’m sitting inside of the question with you rather than having a very concrete answer. I think some questions are so inexhaustible and profound that I think of it less as answering the question, but sort of swimming inside of the question and moving through it, that that’s a very second and useful place for us to be as writers. So I feel like this is one of those deep inexhaustible and wonderful questions. That’s my first thought.

And then I would also say, I think that there is something about archetypes and the story underneath the story. And there’s always subtext in these myths. Again, what does it mean to be passionately in love and to be having this very sacred and very erotic experience, but to only be able to do so in the dark? What does it mean to be told that your marriage is monstrous and unacceptable, and yet to be drawn to it even though it pushes against societal expectations. These are elements that are in this story that’s at least a couple of thousand years old.

And then here we are in this period of history in which I’m a person who got married to a woman before it was legal to do so anywhere in the country in 2002. And so I sort of carry in my skin a relationship to that archetypical question. What if your marriage is called monstrous, and yet you walk into that room anyway? And what does that look like? What are the consequences? How do we live radiantly when the world is bent on our erasure? T.

That’s a very personally urgent question to me. I also think it’s a relevant question for many of us in our current society, and clearly it’s not new. And I think being able to touch on those archetypes and old stories can give us a continuity and perspective. Archetypes and subtext, they speak to us. And they can speak to us in a Marvel movie. I mean, it could be sophisticated literature, but it can also be the superhero and now he’s going to the approach of the Inmost Cave. As a writer, in terms of writer technique, I appreciate Christopher Vogler’s book The Writer’s Journey, which takes the Joseph Campbell’s 12 stages of mythic story, and he posits that all contemporary movies and novels are working with those archetypical possibilities.

And so I think about that and I work on that. And I think that we don’t have to be all about reading deep in the subtext to feel the power and excitement that archetypes can give us as readers.

Marion: Oh, that’s absolutely true. And I believe and I teach that every piece of memoir is a hero’s tale because-

Caro: Oh, good. Yeah.

Marion:… after all, you’re trying to find your own new true home. And that’s what we’re doing here. So it’s so helpful and it’s such a great thing to ponder. And I have of course, the impossible question for you, because you’re a teacher and you’re a luminous writer-

Caro: Thank you.

Marion:… but it’s about defining good writing. I’m going to ask you to help me teach here. Every single day I tell students I work with that ultimately the success of the piece will come down to the writing. They can have remarkable material, they can have a great eye, they can have all the time in the world, but they’re going to have to write it well. Or as we say in my family, you’re going to have to write the hell out of it.

In every review of yours I’ve read your gorgeous writing is mentioned. Madeline Miller, a New York Times bestselling author, refers to you as a “brilliant and luminous writer.” I’ve used the word luminous at least twice I think for you, and I agree. So let’s talk about the how of writing. When asked I say writing begins with reading, then is compounded by curiosity, compassion, vulnerability, more reading, a daily habit of writing and more.

As someone who’s universally held to be a writer of beautiful sentences and stories that have been translated across the globe, what advice do you give to the people listening on how to write well?

Caro: Well, that’s absolutely kind of you to say. Thank you.

Marion: You’re welcome.

Caro: I mean, you just laid out an excellent roadmap for writing excellent sentences and creating the best possible written work and literary work that we can. Absolutely it begins with reading. Masterful books are our best teachers. And they’re our best teachers for many reasons. One, they model possibilities and they allow us to get sparked and inspired by excellent sentences, excellent scenes and paragraphs, and allow us to grow our skills.

But we also get to know what sparks us in particular. So when I teach a graduate seminar at the MFA program at San Francisco State University, we read a book a week and I try to create a syllabus that is international, that is across the aesthetic spectrum. There are many different styles represented on one single syllabus. And people from week to week are invited to ask themselves what sparked them about this book. And it might be different things for different people. So some people are very drawn to crystalline limpid prose. Other people are drawn to the possibility of the long cascading lyric sentence, which is very common in romance languages, like French and Spanish language literature, for example.

And you get to have it all. You get to have all those tools. You can vary your crystalline short sentences with your cascading sentences. It’s about building your own relationship to the realms of aesthetic possibility, rather than trying to squeeze yourself into a cookie cutter of how you’re supposed to write.

Marion: Perfect. And that’s it. And the reading across cultures is such a good suggestion, absolutely. Reading across time and space and cultures.

And so let’s talk a little bit about, as we start to wind this up, let’s talk about experiencing across cultures. In 2022, you were an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson fellow, gathering oral histories of queer and trans BIPOC elders for the arts and Center for the Oral History at Columbia University, one of the largest oral history collections in the world. You were one of 10 fellows. The collection is distinguished for the inclusion of all those who shaped the world, not just, quote, “great men.” Whew, what a relief. Each fellow conducted approximately 30 interviews with people across the US, from the New York City to the Deep South, to Tulsa, Native American reservations, New Mexico.

And so I tell this to writers all the time, you cannot merely write, you must get out, be out, go out into the world. So what did hearing, literally collecting the stories of others, do for you as a human, as a writer, specifically as a writing human.

Caro: It was completely transformative for me to go out into queer and trans communities of color and interview elders as a writer, as a novelist, as a person who had been devoted to storytelling already for so many years, I was really grateful to receive concrete training from excellent oral historians from Columbia University on the specific techniques of oral history.

And at the same time, it was amazing for me to see how my work there built on what I had been doing for many years in Uruguay, the gathering of the stories of and listening deeply to these queer Uruguayan women, these lesbians of an older generation, that led to the writing of Cantoras. So that was a beautiful thing to observe, but I was absolutely amazed and had my mind blown constantly in being able to gather these stories.

I’m so grateful that the archive is about to launch and will be available online. And actually, that’s going to be my next book is a book called So Many Stars: An Oral History of Transgender, Queer, Non-binary, and Two-Spirit Elders of Color. And it’ll be coming out from Algonquin in 2025. So I’m weaving together stories and bringing that novelist’s eye, but also very much in service of other people’s stories. And I think there can be a great power as a writer in getting out of our own way and seeing ourselves as a vessel sometimes for the stories of our communities.

Marion: Well, I hope you’ll come back and talk about that next book. That sounds perfect. And thank you for doing the work. It has been a joy to talk to you, and I wish you all the best with the new book and with all of your writing. The Palace of Eros is gorgeous, and I will make sure to put a link in the transcript to the Columbia program, as well as to all of your work.

Thank you, Caro. It’s been so fun to talk to you.

Caro: Oh, thank you. It’s been such a joy.

Marion: The author is Caro de Robertis. You can see more on them at caro de robertis dot com. The new book is The Palace of Eros, just out by Atria Books. Get it wherever books are sold.

I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes on how to write memoir.

And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review, it helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir classes

Start here, with The Memoir Project System Page, to understand the breadth of all the classes we teach.

Want to jump right in? Here’s a sampling of our classes.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the next  Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.