“My Characters Yearn for Connection”

Radha Vatsal speaks with Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel about her new story collection, “The Accidentals.”

By Radha VatsalJune 18, 2025

• Fiction

GUADALUPE NETTEL’S Still Born (2020; tr. Rosalind Harvey, 2022), a startling and compassionate novel about motherhood, was short-listed for the International Booker Prize in 2023. I first encountered Nettel’s work with After the Winter (2014; tr. Rosalind Harvey, 2018) a novel composed of intertwining narratives set in Havana, Paris, and New York City.

Drawn by the economy of Nettel’s prose, her emotional honesty, and the narrative drive that propels her writing, I turned to The Body Where I Was Born (2011; tr. J. T. Lichtenstein, 2015), the tale of a childhood spent in Mexico City and France; then I read Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2008; tr. Suzanne Jill Levine, 2019) and Natural Histories (2013; tr. J. T. Lichtenstein, 2014), her collections of short stories. Once you pick up one of Nettel’s books, it’s hard to stop reading.

Nettel lives in Mexico City and is currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. We met in New York City, where she was participating in PEN America’s World Voices Festival. This interview took place in person and via email. We discussed her latest story collection, The Accidentals (2023; tr. Rosalind Harvey, 2025); the cultural and political scene in Mexico; and the Spanish-language publishing industry. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

¤

RADHA VATSAL: In a previous interview, you have said The Body Where I Was Born, which I loved, was very autobiographical.

GUADALUPE NETTEL: Yes, it mostly is. It could have been a memoir, but I call it a novel because I wrote it as if it were one in terms of rhythm and structure, but also in the way I used tension and constructed the characters.

Was it hard for you to work in that way with the material?

No, it wasn’t. I actually very much enjoyed revisiting my childhood. I was finally able to adopt some distance and even laugh about things that made me cry so much back in the day. It is said that comedy is tragedy plus time, and that’s exactly how I felt. Later, however, I tried to do the same thing in another book, one based on more recent events, and it wasn’t easy or pleasant.

And what about After the Winter? Is that mostly fiction?

The plot for After the Winter isn’t autobiographical, but there are some elements that I took from my experience in France, like the small apartment in front of Père Lachaise Cemetery where Cecilia lives. In order to write that novel, I took fragments from my Parisian diaries and some letters belonging to an intense correspondence that I had with a friend during my university years in France. The scenes at Clamart Hospital are also inspired by real events. The rest is fiction.

And you have remarked, with regard to Still Born, that you wrote the novel based on an interview you did with a friend.

Yes, before I began to write, I did several interviews with my friend Amelia, the inspiration for Alina’s character and the person to whom the book is dedicated. Laura’s story as well as Doris’s and Nicolás’s stories are entirely fiction, so this novel uses different devices and techniques.

You have said that you were thinking that Still Born would be a novella. I’m curious what separates a novella from a novel for you, because Still Born is quite a short novel, under 200 pages.

Still Born would have been a novella if it hadn’t had a second part. You know, sometimes I feel the writing takes me to places I never imagined. It’s as if the story were deciding things for me, as if it had a will and a life of its own.

I was there, trying to take some distance from it and see how everything was set up, and then I said to myself, Okay, so this book needs a second part. There’s the need to develop this character more. Many things entered the plot this way, things that were happening in my house, in the city, in my country, like the massive feminist demonstrations. The story about the birds, for instance, is based on a couple of pigeons that appeared on my balcony while I was writing. So, sometimes I feel that I built Still Born like how birds build their nests, taking things from here and there till the book suddenly took form.

There’s a quote by Gabriel García Márquez where he says that writing a story is almost as if you’re a potter and it’s a single pour, and either it works out or, if it doesn’t, you have to redo the whole thing, whereas writing a novel is like building a house with bricks: you can move the pieces around. Do you feel that the short stories come in one fell swoop or do you feel like they’re also something that you construct?

Since they’re not very short, the stories in The Accidentals allowed me to work more with plot and structure. I took my time to work on every text. Sometimes I rewrite them several times and invert the order of events. But it’s true that writing short stories is more impulsive than writing a novel. If I don’t write them on the spot, I know I never will.

Maybe you won’t agree, but I feel that your stories have more of a fantastic element and the novels seem more based in reality.

Yes, that’s true. This is something I really like about this genre. I feel more freedom to fantasize. I can get crazier.

Let’s talk about The Accidentals. It’s a collection of eight stories about characters who are dislocated and feel quite distanced from the world around them. At least two are clearly written in the aftermath of the pandemic. What about the rest?

As is the case for many of my short stories, the ones in The Accidentals stand on the edge of fantasy and realism. You never know exactly where you are standing. In this collection, there is one dystopic story and another that is fully fantastic, but the rest are always ambiguous.

I like very much to stay in this liminal space, this borderline between what is possible and what is not. It is difficult for the reader to decide whether the characters are truly living these events or if it’s just their approach that makes things so uncanny. The pandemic was pretty much like that. I wrote some of these stories under the effect of anguish, in this very special state of mind, where I couldn’t fully believe what was happening. It is a period in history that has affected us more than we realize and we are still processing it.

In your story “Playing with Fire,” I was struck by the relationship between the father and the eldest son—the tension and the violence there. That’s something I think you do so well: narrate difficult emotions without judging them.

I am very intrigued by anger—the banned emotion—the only emotion our society doesn’t accept. We are taught to feel compassion for people who are sad or scared, but we normally don’t show any compassion for people who are angry. Anger usually hides a lot of preexisting pain. When it arises, it feels like poison burning our body from the inside. So, angry people suffer a lot. On top of that, they are ostracized, and that adds to their condition and the suffering of isolation. And yet, for many people, anger is the only way they manage to express anguish and stress.

All the characters in The Accidentals seem to be searching for connections, for answers to the predicaments they find themselves in. In “Life Elsewhere,” the narrator, a frustrated actor, responds to his disappointment in his own life by trying to infiltrate someone else’s. What drew you to that particular “solution”?

When I lived in Barcelona, I discovered that it’s very difficult to rent an apartment there. People snatch up rentals quickly. When I was looking for a place to live, I lost a house that I loved because a couple secured it, and I wanted to write about this disappointment, and about everything that a house represents.

When I was doing so, I realized that something similar happens in my professional field. In the world of art and literature, people are subject to a lot of rivalry and competition. They feel that if someone else achieves success and recognition, it’s as if they’re losing that themselves. I never thought that meddling in someone else’s life was a solution. What I wanted to show is how envy and competitiveness can drive people to madness.

Can you tell us about how you use nature in your work and in these stories specifically? In “The Torpor,” it seems redemptive. In “A Forest Under the Earth,” the narrator’s relationship to the tree that grows beside her house seems more ambivalent. In “The Accidentals,” the albatross serves as a metaphor for a person who can’t return home.

Being in the countryside, in the forest, and especially by the sea has always helped me rebalance my mind and body. Those of us who live in big cities often forget that we are part of this living being called Earth and begin to believe myths and lies, such as the supremacy of reason, and the ability of science, technological progress, and purchasing power to make us feel happy. For me, happiness is awakened when I am connected to the other living beings that inhabit the planet, including humans. That’s why my characters yearn for connection.

During the pandemic, we began to have many doubts about these goals that “civilized” beings have pursued for more than a century, especially since the Industrial Revolution. We began to wonder if everything governments and large corporations had led us to believe was true. We began to suspect that we had been living in a delusion. The stories in this book speak about these glimpses of understanding that we experienced during the lockdown, when many of us longed only to go to the forest and the countryside, to the sea and the mountains, to feel alive again.

Do you place yourself in any sort of literary tradition or do you feel like you just do what you do?

I wouldn’t say I follow in the footsteps of Borges and Cortázar or that I consider myself to be alongside this or that author. But I was nurtured by reading them. I really, deeply read Borges and Cortázar and also García Márquez and Silvina Ocampo. And I do read contemporary Latin American writers like Samanta Schweblin or Mariana Enríquez. I like their work, and read them carefully. I’m constantly in dialogue with them in my mind, as well as with other writers I admire.

And did you read those books growing up? I grew up in India speaking English as my first language, so the books that I grew up reading were all British books, by English writers, not works by Indian writers. And I’m curious, did you grow up reading those books, or because you moved to France—?

Yes, I did. And I also grew up reading French authors, like Maupassant, Gautier, and Huysmans—fantastic French authors from the 19th century. So, both cultures are at the heart of my interests.

I’m curious about the art scene and the political situation in Mexico. There seems to be so much movement towards Mexico and Mexico City. And Claudia Sheinbaum—everyone I know seems to wish we had a president like that.

The art scene is very dynamic. People are doing many interesting things. Compared to Europe, for instance, it’s much more energetic.

It is difficult for me to speak about the political climate because I don’t live there right now, but seen from afar, our current president is fine. I think it’s great that we are ruled by a woman who is a scientist and a leftist. She seems concerned about climate change and I also like that. But we have to say that her situation is not easy at all. The drug cartels and the many other power lobbies are there and they’re very strong. So the president isn’t entirely free to do whatever she thinks is best for the country. She has lots of obligations and has to make compromises.

Of course, if you’re American and you move to Mexico City, you can have a wonderful life because the city is very welcoming and there are lots of things to do. The food is amazing. Things aren’t too expensive. And there are parks and bars and bookstores and cafés. But you always have this feeling that you’re in a bubble, and underneath it all, there are so many people starving, facing racism and inequality, risking their lives to defend their cultures, being repressed for this and that. And it’s not just me saying this; there are official numbers. It is said that Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries for journalists, and I believe it.

There are so many disappeared people. And outside of Mexico City—

Yes. And every time they find a mass grave, there are 300 people buried in it. Sometimes those bodies have been tortured beyond recognition. I don’t understand why people get so wild and violent. It’s terribly disturbing.

My first novel El huésped (“The Guest,” 2006), which hasn’t been translated into any language other than French, is about this duplicity of Mexico City. You have the city we know, and then there’s its underground, where lots of other things are taking place.

Do you feel that, in Mexico, you have a lot more freedom in how you can write? As a crime writer in the United States, I feel like I get pushed into categories, and in my mind, there’s no hard distinction.

On the one hand, I think it is really heavy when a publisher tells you, “You should write this specific genre.” I think I could never do that. But it’s also good to have guidelines and an editor telling you to explore a certain direction. So, it has its pros and cons. In the Spanish-speaking world, things are very different. The publishers or editors rarely give you feedback. If it’s good, they publish it, and if it’s not, they don’t. But they don’t help you to give birth to it.

So, when you write, are you showing your work to other people first and getting their feedback and then not expecting your editor to give you so much feedback?

Yes [laughs]. That’s exactly how it works. You better have good writer friends, and people you can trust. If you insist, publishers can find you an editor to work with. But it’s not the same kind of editing that they do here in the States.

I was in Mexico City last year, and I thought the bookstores were amazing.

Some of them are. I prefer Spanish bookstores, though. They receive books from all over the Spanish-speaking world. La Central is my favorite bookstore in Spain. There, you can also find books in French and English.

And do you feel like there’s a strong intellectual culture also in Mexico City?

Yes, there has always been. There are very good writers and thinkers in Mexico City. La UNAM, the country’s largest public university, is amazing. They bring guest speakers from all over the world. In recent years, we had Judith Butler, Annie Ernaux, J. M. Coetzee, and many other extraordinary writers.

But it’s strange that I don’t come to the US very often. Over the course of my life, I have been more in touch with Europe than with the US. This year, I’m living in Paris, but the residence program I’m attending is run by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination. So, this year I’ve been meeting many people from the States in Paris. I feel I’m finally beginning to have a relationship with this country.

¤

Featured image: Photo of Guadalupe Nettel by Mely Ávila.