Yo - Softcover

The heroine of Julia Alvarez's Yo! is an author who writes what she knows--much to the chagrin of her close-knit immigrant family. During the first chapter, one of Yolanda (Yo) Garcia's sisters explains the basic problem: "I always was a reader, but now, whenever I open a book, even if it's something by someone dead, all I can do is shake my head and think oh my god, I wonder what their family thought of this story." Yo's friends and family members, many of whom appeared in Alvarez's earlier novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, take turns narrating this book. They draw a vivid portrait of the writer, describing her big mouth and high-strung nature as well as the details of her youth in the Dominican Republic. They're often more keenly aware of class, gender, and racial divisions than is Yo herself. When Yo returns to the Dominican Republic to spend a summer reconnecting with her roots, for instance, the servants at the family estate regard her as a very strange (but likeable) foreigner. In another segment, Yo's landlord, whose husband beats her, describes the writer's efforts to save her from the abusive relationship. In these episodes and others, Yo comes across as a woman who doesn't quite fathom the complexity of the events going on around her but has so much good will and verve that people forgive her small transgressions. It is a pleasure to hear all these diverse voices; some are funny, some wistful, but all of them seem to think Yolanda Garcia is the bee's knees. Yo! is a thoughtful, entertaining novel about the immigrant experience and the impact writers have on the lives of their peers. --Jill Marquis

Julia Alvarez discusses her character, Yo, and the world in which she lives.

Yo knows her name is a dirty word in Spanish. Not really dirty like chingate or jodio or coño, but an off-limits word for girls growing up in her family. "Don't say yo," her mother would say. "Think about the other person. Ask them what they want first."

It was for boys to say what they wanted. The uncles with their sleek, pomaded heads, looking like seals, sat on the wicker sofas and tossed out the word in such an offhand way, Yo quiero . . . Yo pienso . . . , I want this, I think that. The archbishop arrived for dinner in his black robes with a bright red satin sash at his middle and a little perky hat riding the top of his bald head. Yo's mother always served him first. Would he prefer the breast or the drumstick?

Yo prefiero, he pronounced, and the white meat was stacked on his plate and baptized with a ladle of gravy. After he had eaten, the archbishop asked the children if they knew the seven deadly sins and the four cardinal sins. The worst one was selfishness. Thinking always about yo, yo, yo.

But the boy cousins cried out yo, yo, yo, yo whenever the uncles asked the assembled gang: Who was the smartest? the tallest? the strongest? the greatest?

Yo and her sisters were supposed to keep quiet.

But Yo was already making plans.

Sometimes she hid by the hibiscus hedge and let the maid wander the yard, calling out her name, looking for her. Her mother was soon summoned. The first place the two distraught women checked was the lily pond. Maybe Yo had disobeyed once again and gone under permanently. ¡Yo!

Sometimes she answered the call, but they weren't really calling her. "Yo te quiero, mami linda," the gardener was saying to the maid behind the ceiba tree at the back of the yard. I love you, pretty mami. "Coño! Yo . . ." the chauffeur cried, throwing down his cap. "Yo ya no aguanto mas!" I can't take it anymore!

Everyone helped themselves to her nickname in talking about themselves.

Yo learned early to submerge herself in the yo of others. That's the way nice girls did it. They got other people to say what they wanted, and then they just threw their little old selves into the bargain. Girls knew about points of view. They were made up of what everyone else thought they should be. Boys had character. Girls had personality.

In English her name became a street call, sassy and low class. "Yo!" one kid might greet another, hands slapping high fives. After all those years of saying yo in a quiet tone of voice, Yo loved to hear her name shouted in the streets of Spanish Harlem when she went to work in Papi's first office.

But all that training to be a nice girl took its toll. There were times when Yo didn't know who she was unless she was with someone who could tell her. It was like singing in a chorus. Was she alto or soprano? She was whatever the person singing next to her was. A chameleon voice.

She had a professor who once told her this was actually a good quality for a writer to have. It was called negative capability, and all the great male writers had it-Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, Shakespeare especially.

It sounded terrible, negative capability. Like the word selfishness. Like the word yo in Spanish.

And what about Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë? Did they have negative capability, too, or just talent?

Many times Yo despaired. She did not want all she had been thinking and planning behind the hibiscus hedge to be just another silly girl's vague daydreams. She wanted to tell stories about the many Yos in the world and inside her.

And as she struggled to make those hibiscus dreams real, she left stories in her wake, people who knew of her dreams and of how she struggled to achieve them, people who didn't know what to think of her. She left behind a trail of stories as she moved through her life toward that blank sheet of paper.

Recommended Reading from Julia Alvarez

I'm always reading a book, and I usually fall in love with something about that book if it's any good at all. I keep a diary of all the books I read, with notes to myself of what I liked or didn't like about each one. I looked at the last five years of my reading list and picked a dozen fiction titles by my contemporaries-keystone books for me, books that taught me something about writing, and about the human heart:

Animal Dreams, by Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver writes about post-sixties people (like me), still trying to live out promises we made to ourselves back then. There's an intimacy and genuineness to her style I truly admire.

Continental Drift, by Russell Banks. As for how to be political and still tell a good story, this book gets that balance perfectly. It also taught me a lot about achieving irony by the juxtaposition of two different "plots."

The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje. Plotting a novel is not just about charting a series of actions but about plunging your reader into the rhythms of a character's being. I love this strange, lyrical book.

Paradise, by Elena Castedo. A novel presenting the complex adult world from the fresh and delightful point of view of a young girl, it taught me about voice, and about the humor of hearing a story "out of the mouths of babes."

The Shipping News, by E. Annie Proulx. An author who knows everything. Among her many other gifts, I love her prickly, brisk, felicitous prose style. I kept a dictionary handy and learned a lot of new words.