>> books are available at the registers and will have signing line right at the table. [inaudible conversations] >> tonight on booktv started at the eastern, highlights from our "in depth" programs. after a day of social distancing get close to a good book tonight, booktv on c-span2. >> jaquira diaz is with us today courtesy of david anday noel ray and rosalind rock. she was born in puerto rico.

her work has been published in rolling stone, the guardian, long reads, and the "new york times" style magazine. and include in the best american essays 2016. she is the recipient of two push prices and elizabeth george foundation grant, and fellowships from the mcdowell, the kenyon review and the wisconsin institute for creative writing. she lives in miami beach with herer partner. please give a warm savannah welcome to jaquira diaz. [applause] >> thank you so much. i'm so happy too be here and its wonderful to see all you book levers here, and thank you, savannah, for your southern

hospitality. i also want to thank the savannah book festival and everyone who made thisnk event possible, including sponsors, booksellers. let's give it up for the indie book sellers in the room. [applause] i love you all. thank you for all that you do for loving books, for championing writers, for supporting ordinary girls. because of you i'm here, so thank you. i want to open with just a little piece that opens the book "ordinary girls." it functions kind of like a prologue but not really. it's just a very short section. girl, , good. we were the girls who strolled onto the blacktop on long summer days dribbling past the boys on the court. we were the girls on the merry go rounds laughing and laughing and letting the world spin while holding on for our lives. the girls on the swings throwing

our heads back, the wing in our hair. we were the loudmouths, the troublemakers, the practical jokers. we were the party girls hitting the clubs in booty shorts and hightop jordan's smoking blunts on the beach. we with the wild girls who loved music and dancing. girls who were black and brown and poor and. girls who love each other. i have been those girls on a greyhound bus, homeless and on the run. a girl sleeping on lifeguard stands behind restaurants, on a busstop bench. a hoodlum girl throwing down with boys and girls and her older sisters and even the cops took suspended every year for fighting on the first day of school. kicked out of music class for throwing a chair at the math teachers son. kicked off to make different school buses, kicked out of pre-algebra for stealing the teachers great book. a girl who got slammed onto a

police car like two cops in front of theup whole school aftr a brawl with six of the girls. and i have been other girls, girl standing before a judge, girl on a dock the morning after a hurricane looking out at the bay like it's the end of the world. girl on a rooftop, girl on a ledge, girl plummeting to the air and years later a woman writing letters to a prisoner on death row. this is the opening of my book, and i'll talk a little bit about the inspiration and what why ie it. this book took about 12 years to write and it is without a doubt my life work. ordinary girls is about my girlhood and adolescents in puerto rico and miami beach, about growing up and closeted, about surviving depression and violence. it's about love and friendship and family, about our parents

and how their actions shape us, about losing the people we love, about how we are not defined by the worst thinge we've ever don. and it's about my relationship with my mother. growing up i was a juvenile offenders that most of her time on the streets get at 11 attempted suicide for the first time. then if you went after that i ran away from home for the first time, then i started getting arrested. i dropped out ofn high school, kept running away, kept getting arrested, kept fighting in the streets, kept trying to die. i was also in the middle of a sexual awakening and was later finally come out as gay. but ihe couldn't talk about tha, not to a anyone, not in the eary '90s, not in my neighborhood which was marked by homophobia and trans-phobia trans-phobia d attacks on gave people. and certainly not to my mother.

i spent much of my childhood and adolescence pretending to be someone else, especially when it seems like the whole world was trying to erase us. i spent a lot of that time hiding in books, looking for myself in stories. after i became a writer i decided that i would write about people like me. girls and women who were black and brown and poor and and another. about women like my mother, a white puerto rican woman who did know how to raise or protect her black children who would spend her entire life struggling with mental illness and addiction. my mother was and is accommodated woman. she was loving and abusive. she held me one minute and then it kicked my and then held me again. she was and is flawed and vulnerable. my mother was and is deeply

homophobic. when i first started writing ordinary girls. my mother was a ghost. i wrote around her. avoiding the truth. the truth was painful. the truth was that my mother broke me and she was the single most difficult subject to write about. a black puerto rican woman who carried meet my whole life carries me still. who taught me to pray and cook and chain smoke and taught me to keep house and taught me everything i know about forgiveness. i wrote about it. a miami beach woman who tortured and murdered her 3-year-old son and dumped his body in a neighborhood close to where i grew up. and spent most of her life on

death row. i wrote about my mother's mother my grandmother's mercy. she hated the fact she had have his children that her grandchildren were black. she would later die by suicide. and i wrote about them. the mythical woman the legend who took her children from their bed that night. in carried them to a nearby river. held them underwater until they drowned. and then drowned herself. and now her ghost haunts bodies of water. i read about all these other mothers any mothers except my own until a friend who read the manuscript ask after reading about five chapters where is your mother.

i have to sit down with the book and take a hard honest look at the pages. examine my life and all of the reasons i had been avoiding writing about my mother. the truth is my mother broke me in the truth is i was afraid to look to admit to see how much she had broken me. how hard it had been to find my way back to myself how easily i could be broken again. but i finally decided to ask the question and more than that to ask the question for myself. to answer it, where is my mother. to write about her to examine the relationship in a way that was honest that acknowledged all of the ways that she was real the writing from beginning to end took about 12 years i have to step away from the book several times and there were many different versions. to say that the writing of this book drains me. it would be a understatement. i gained weight, i lost weight. my hair started falling out. i've have the worst insomnia i've have in my life.

and then my grandmother died by suicide. i often needed time away from the book to take care of myself. and to make sense of what i was doing to interrogate different parts of the book it was quite the opposite. writing this book is the hardest thing i have ever done. what kept me going. i wanted to write about people who rarely have a home in the literary landscape. i wanted to y up -- write about growing up poor in miami. about all of the ways that they were invisible and hyper visible and i wanted to write about my community without losing sight of what mattered most. the people i were writing about were real. they existed. that they lived and loved.

even if the rest of the world did not see them. when i started writing this book i thought not about how to write my story but how my story was and is connected to a larger world. and what my place in that world might be. i'm here because i found that place. thanks to a group of friends who saved me. i was struggling as a girl as a woman and later as a writer struggling with how to write about sexual violence in a way that was honest in still artful. in a way that was not just about my experience but spoke to something larger about girls. about how complicated family lives in fights and loves. i wanted to write it without pity or glory or anger. also, more so than any of my girls i am someone who had had access to education. two fellowships into writing

conferences. it has taken a lot of hard work but that does not erase the fact that i've had access to all of this and that most of the girls in my community had not. >> the world is not kind too black and brown girls. in the world isn't kind too black and brown women. especially when they come from working-class communities or poverty. these girls taught me that it's possible to make our own families to make her own way. they helped me believe in love and friendship and hope that more than anything after they have girls of their own it was there girls who taught me the most important lessons i needed to learn in order to write this book. they helped me to see the girl i had been they helped me

remember that there are girls out there who are just like i was. my story was not unique. all girls no matter the circumstance are vulnerable this is something we share. that transcends borders and ethnicity and race and class somewhere there is a teenage girl whose mother suffers from mental illness and rejection just trying to get through the day. and try to come to terms with her sexuality. imagine maybe seen herself in this book will make this life a little bit easier. some of the other things i talk about in the book are also things that were very important to me. they made me a writer. my father loved books.

he was a poet. who stopped writing poetry and one of my earliest memories was of my father he took me to the funeral up puerto rican protest poet. and when i saw everyone gathered and celebrated his life. people who have read has his book. i thought, that poets were important and that they could change the world. i thought i want that. i also wanted this book to say something about access into gets access to this world. who gets to be up here. and talk about books it was important to me because coming

from where i came from. i always felt like i did not had enough. it was important for me to talk about that and talk about puerto rican history. in the relationship. i started thinking about how to include our history in a memoir that was something that was not a history book and how my story is connected to that story. being puerto rican i think most of us who come to puerto rico we feel a connection to the island even after we had left it even if we never been there. which is the truth. i saying that a lot of puerto ricans know. it comes from a poem it means that i would be puerto rican even if i was born on the moon. i wanted to reach people that would never be there.

people that did not had access to that history. for whatever reason and make some of that history assessable to the general reader. i tried to talk about the parts of local history. a lot of this influenced the kind of a writer i became. i was always thinking of who i was writing for in some ways i felt like this book even though i intended it to be as open and honest and as vulnerable i wanted it to be in conversation with a very specific group of people girls who are like girls who grew up in poverty.

and for them to understand i wasn't just writing about them but i was writing for them. something i mentioned in the book is how i was a kid who loved to read. and i didn't have money for books so i went to the library and i asked librarians to give me books i read everything they put in my hands. and they were all books that were written about white people and for white people. i thought to be a writer you have to be brought white. i wanted them to understand and to see themselves that that was not real. that we exist. that this is possible. there were other parts of this book that shaped me at the time i thought about how it

would make sense to the story. one of them was the baby lollipop's murder that i talk about which happened in 1990 there was a toddler found in our neighborhood in miami beach at the time they didn't know where the toddler came from. just that they had found his body. i saw this story on the news they took over at the 24 hour news cycle. at the time i was 11. i was a kid. because i was on the news. and everybody in my neighborhood was talking about it. we kind of obsessed about this. i already imagined myself a writer and so i took notes and i thought about this a lot in for weeks i thought about this until they discovered and they found the baby's mother in the

story came out on the news that they had found the mother and the partner and that they had dumped his body and fled. part of the narrative at the time part of what was very important at the time the news made it sound like this woman and her partner these two lesbians kill this baby and ran away. they made it sound like being a lesbian was part of the crime. and the people talked about this in my neighborhood including teachers and school security. always talked about this with either implicit or explicit homophobia. i kept thinking about the story. and then 20 years later. i wrote an essay of being this little girl when the story broke and the essay was

published in the magazine called the sun. a woman who have been at the time working as a anti- death penalty activists. they read it. and e-mail me and said i know this woman you wrote about. i had been visiting her in prison. she has been on death row since 1992. i wrote back to her if we could start a correspondence. eventually i wrote to them and i told her i had written about her. she wrote back. she wrote me letters. her first letter was kind of livid. she was upset that i had written about her. and she said. you didn't know me you didn't know my son. what gives me the right -- you the right to even write about

me. i wrote back and told her my story. i told her who i was. and why i had written about it. i was a child at the time. i told her that i would like to hear her story not what the newspaper said or what was on the news but the truth i include this in the book because i think it is important for readers to see the writer implicate themselves and talk about how they are complicit in certain violence is. and when i ask her to tell me her story she wrote back and said this is not a story this is my life. she put me in my place. and i deserved it. i really started thinking about why i was writing in my

i was writing it this way. i went back to the beginning of the book. and i started interrogating myself and my was telling the story. and if i have a right to tell the story considering that i wasn't really a resident of that anymore. i had access to all of these things that i was in graduate school and the people i was writing about did not had access to any of that. she really got me to think about seeing all of the women i am writing about and thinking about the fact that i am writing about real people another woman i mentioned in the book whose name i didn't even know. who died by suicide and i also

thought about her a lot. and i included her in the book because i thought about her in the same way. at the time i suffered from major depression. and thinking about taking my life and thinking about taking this woman as a story as a legend. i also wanted to include in the book how i caught myself thinking this way. and to remind the readers that these are not just stories. she was a well -- a real woman. in 2017 she got a new trial. i was corresponding with her for several years i was not

writing her all the time. i would send an occasional letter and then she would write back. where she would write two or three letters and then i would write back. one of the things that she asked for after she let me have it because i wrote about her. she did want me to write about her except it became very clear that she wanted to control the narrative. and she wanted me to go to her retrial i did. she was being tried for murder again but this time the death penalty was off the table and as i sat in the trial after having this correspondence with her. and feeling like there was enough evidence to prove that someone else was personally responsible. i realized that she was lying. she got caught lying on the

sand three separate times. i included a little bit of that also because they really wanted i really wanted the readers to think about this idea of her that i have constructed in my had and how that kind of fell apart because i wasn't really to get of her as a woman. i had been thinking of this other story that i was following. there are these other moments in the book where i thought they were important to kind of call myself out i talked about writing puerto rico and one of the things that i've done over the years is to visit puerto rico and to go back almost every summer spent time with family. i still have most of my family there. into drive around and so i drove to san juan one afternoon and if any of you had been to puerto rico there

is this building called the puerto rico tourism company. it used to be a prison used to be a prison where puerto ricans were tortured and murdered and somehow the building was purchased and now it is the tourism company. it's a place where you can get trolley maps. there is a gallery and a grand piano. the building still has two jail cells in their original condition where people stop and take photos. when i went back to visit the building after having written most of this book almost all of it i was thinking i knew the history of this place. and i was not intending to see

what have been. a prison or people were tortured and lost their lives. and yet when i got there and saw families and tourists a woman asked me she handed me her phone and she asked me to take a photo of her with her two children. i took her phone and i took a picture of them. and then i ask her to do the same to take a picture of me in front of the jail cell. it is a moment that even at the time i knew what i was doing its a moment that now fills me with shame. it was like i was trying to forget. i needed to include in the book to call myself out and to talk openly about how the desire to erase history and to erase violence. into is complicit.

something that is also in the book. a lot of people have said that miami is like another character. miami is a setting for part of the book. in the atmosphere and historical marker and a cultural marker and i try to capture what was it for me the real miami. in movies and in movie videos. it was kind of invisible and everything i consumed either on tv which was the working-class miami beach that was just four blocks away from ocean drive where people lived in poverty and people have rats in their apartment.

this is very real when i was growing up in miami. where we would have a building that was falling apart and crumbling. and a block away we have a building that have been bought. in renovated and was beautiful. people with a lot of money drove there. and we all lived in the same neighborhood. a kind it kind of felt like the strange liminal state to live in a place that did not want you there with people who didn't really want to see you. and to be slowly pushed out. i wanted to kind of have that miami beach of this time be very present in the book. i wanted to say something

about a place can be beautiful and ugly. to say something about the migrant experience how people are more than what you see on the surface. most of those people and immigrants. most of them have educations and professions back home and then came to miami and drove taxis i have to go back to school. and brought their families and lived in poverty. my family have friends who were taxi drivers. they have to come and start from scratch because they have to learn the language. they were struggling in other ways also.

i wanted that in the book. that was real. it was the reality that they lived in. >> something else that is in the book before i talk about how we became a writer. mental illness my mother suffered from milt -- mental illness and continues to struggle. it was very clear when we were kids that something was wrong. my mother went undiagnosed until we moved to miami beach from puerto rico. she had been under diagnosis for years and because we were poor we didn't really had adequate medical care. it was clear that it would've

been different had we have money. she might've been diagnosed if we had had resources her life might have been different. i also talk a little bit about my maternal grandmother's mental illness and hers with 40 ideation. she did die by suicide in 2011 which is something that is present in the book. but it was present during my whole life growing up. because of my grandmother talked about this so often she threatened often. she was also suffering from mental illness and depression and took a lot of medication. and when i was a kid i also was suffering from depression. i was undiagnosed for years but i thought that this seemed

like an easy way out at the time. it seemed much easier than living. >> how i became a writer is also something i touch on in the book when i was 16 i dropped out of high school and then i got my ged and then i started taking classes at a community college. for a brief time i was in the navy. and then this was also in right in the middle of the don't ask don't tell. the military became a place when i first got there. it was a place that filled me with hope ironically and it

was that don't ask don't tell. people expected me to succeed. i felt like i could start fresh in a place where no one knew me and reinvent myself. and then i could work hard and have a future. it was the first time i thought i could have a future. and then the navy became unbearable. i was bullied for being gay. i have a relationship with being a woman. someone found out and it spread. the rumors spread and eventually don't ask don't tell became my nickname. i left the military it's not something that i talk about extensively in the book. it's just one chapter but i do mention it because it became sort of like a bridge away for me to think of a life worth living.

after leaving the military i went back to college and i did very well. i decided i would be a writer. that it was possible. even if no one published my books i would write. and then after graduate school i got this fellowship to the wisconsin institute for creative writing because i applied for fellowships and scholarships and everything. if i could afford it i could apply for it. suddenly, one day i got a phone call. they told me that i got it. i moved to wisconsin it was cold and there was a lot of cheese but it was great.

>> i have a dairy allergy. >> i have a dairy allergy. [laughing] it was also difficult. but but then i started teaching, and slowly things started falling into place. it was a lot of hard work in teaching and years when i just worked odd jobs and kept trying to write this book and would take a break and stepped away from it. and then went back to it when i could, and then abandoned it and started to try do right as a novel because it didn't go possible to admit all of these things to people. and then i decided to actually go through with it and write this book because i thought it was important that i tell the truth, and writing it on section even if i didn't change a word felt like line. i'd like to possibly open the

room to some questions and conversations. maybe something later. [laughing] but before i do that, i also wanted to read you a very short short section because this i think is what's at the core of the book. the book is also about girlhood and about navigating a certain kind of girlhood in puerto rico in miami beach, and i was talking about not just myself navigating this girlhood myself but about these other girls who were my lifeline, and so i'm going to read you one paragraph which really is at the core of what this book is.

we were short shorts and crop tops, baggy jeans and basketball jerseys, big hoop earrings, and no matter what everybody had opinions about how we dressed, called us tomboys and hood rats or fast girls. our shorts were too short. our genes too tight, too baggy. our voices to love. everybody wanted to control what we wore, what we did, who we did it with your we were not the girls they wanted us to be. we were not allowed to talk like this, you want like this. we were not supposed to feel the kind of desire you feel at 13, at 14. what kind of girl they love, to say. what kind of girl even as they took what we gave, took what we try to hold onto, our voices, our bodies. we were trying to live, but the world was doing its best to kill

us. thank you. [applause] >> thank you. i appreciate it and thank you for like powering through that. in real life i'm very funny. [laughing] i promise. if you would like to ask the question, we ask just so everyone can hear you, , there'a mic in the middle for you to step up to the mic, if you can. yes, go ahead. >> thank you. what an important story to share with all of us. so i have a light or a heavy question. your choice. light question would be, what other writers or authors have

inspired you? >> so many writers and authors have inspired me. i remember reading esmeralda when i was puerto rican when ass a teenager. i think i was 19, and i thought this was the first time that i read a book in english about puerto ricans who would like me, like just normal people living their everyday lives. .. >> i also read toni morrison and i thought, zero my god, this is incredible. you can do this? and i thought i will never be able to do this.

i still think that. you should read everything toni morrison has written, everyone should some writers writing today who inspire me today, i love catalina is latest novel, can tora come i love angie cruz dominicana. i also read a lot of poets. i love -- and natalie years, when my brother was -- >> i could go on forever, but i won't. andy had another question, or did someone else have a question question to make now i have to call you out, i'm a resident of northern wisconsin. a lifelong resident of northern wisconsin. not that cold in madison. >> it was cold, for me.

mike just kidding. tell me the dances you and your girls did, how that function for you, was it -- tell us about that systemic so, dancing and music in a lot of ways for me i studied music when i was a kid between scene was more i think about performance in performing performing for me specifically performing a strength, he was very often in miami when i started going through puberty i felt the unwanted attention from men and come i developed very early and i felt like i was getting all this attention that i wasn't interested in so i started resting in boys) i wore baggy jeans and polo shirts and basketball jerseys and, i

dressed head to toe like a boy and i did not want -- i think dancing was like that, pretending to be someone else, pretending to be stronger, pretending to be happy but it was also for me and my girls dancing is like but we did just because we needed something to do, we went to bayside marketplace where you could pay $3 to get on a boat that had a dance floor and, music kind of got us through a lot. we needed to dance. especially during that time, we needed music and, so now, when i look back at everything that we live through, it felt like dancing was not just performance but it was resistance and survival.

thank you, other questions. >> will you please talk a little bit about your editing process? how much was edited and how did you get within editor and agent and publisher? to make so, my first step even before the book was finished actually i actually started submitted parts of the book to agents that i found online without really knowing anything about how publishing works come about. don't do that. there's plenty of information out that's free on the internet and, find out if you're interested in getting an agent, what books, what kind of books you are interested in writing and what are the books out there on the market that are like yours scum or like the books you want to write.

and, who are the agents who represent the writers you love or writers who are writing about something similar and, do research on them. there's plenty of information, there's interviews and articles and profiles on to a wealth of information out there about this, but i went and submitted part of this book to an agent who is at a very big house and had a lot of very big name authors. and she read one chapter and she liked it and she offered me representation and sign me right away. and i thought, i made it, hit the lottery. i got a big agent at a big house. my book is going to be a bestseller. and then i did not hear from her for a very long time. she was at a big agency and had very big clients and isa very little, little fish. she did not have time for me. and so, i kept writing and then i went to the writers conference

and there was an agent there, michelle brower and i had signed up for scholars reading and so i read from this book and she heard me read and she e-mailed me, she got my e-mail from the conference and said, would you submit some work to us and because i had this very powerful agents come i did not center anything and then she wrote me a year later to say, i saw that you publish this other essay. if you have work we semi- some work and i still do not center anything. and then by then i had already parted ways with my agent and the third year, the third year in a row actually around the same time she wrote me again and

she asked if i would send her something. and i said i thought, what have i been waiting for. this agent has heard me read, has read my work, as read other pieces and gets my vision and likes my writing. so i sent her work and a i think about 100 pages that would eventually make it in this book, and she asked if we could have a conversation, we had a conversation for about an hour we talked about this book, we talked about what else i wanted to do in the future come about the possibility of a career, and then she offered me representation. but, the book wasn't ready to be sent to editors and be published so she gave me extensive notes and said, go back and keep writing again, so i went back with her notes and i wrote ten i wrote and years come i think three years later the book was ready. like i said, the whole process took about 12 years. and then, when she thought the

book was ready and polished enough she sent it to several editors and we got what i want to say a couple of offers right away and before the book went into auction we got an offer from-algonquin books and i have a conversation with my agent and i really liked what she had to say about how she wanted to preserve my voice and not turn it into some commercial book. she wanted me to tell her what i wanted to do and to help me get there and that's what i wanted. all of my other conversations with editors at big houses had been, we can make this the next educated and i haven't read educated, but i'm pretty sure this is not that. and, every conversation i had had with editors was more about

what they wanted me to do and kathy was more about, i will work to get this to become the book you wanted to be in so, we went with kathy and i feel very likely to have had her as an editor. when i look back at the pages of what this book look like before, can even believe you kept reading after page ten. and i feel the process was very much a collaboration but i feel very lucky to have her heads as an editor. >> semi- because your mother read the book, and if so has that changed your relationship. if it hasn't, just does the mere existence of the book alter her in anyway? >> my mother is not a reader. she doesn't read, but i have talked with her extensively about the book and she's like she knows i'm a writer and she

knows what the book is about. she's a lot more interested in, will there be a movie in his can apply her. [laughter] you all are laughing, but i'm serious. now, my mom i wrote a book but, so if you read the book you will know that knows a stranger my mother for about seven years. we did not talk, i completely remove myself from her life and her family's life or my own mental health and then, when my grandmother died i felt like finally i could reach out to my mother and start a relationship again, that took years though. my mother is clean now, he is in an assisted living facility and we are able to have

conversations now and she calls me every day and sometimes three or four times a day just to say i saw this thing on tv, but it's difficult because my mother is an addict and even though she is clean she's also still suffering from mental illness and often i don't know what to expect. so, seeing her when i visit her seen her requires me to do this kind of work that is harmful. like i have to be harmful to my mental health. i have to be willing to forgive her every single time i walk in there, every time i pick up that phone. i have to be open to forgiveness every single conversation, every single visit, otherwise i won't be able to have a relationship with her. and i won't be able to live with myself. so, it's difficult but we do have a relationship. i just got engaged last year and my mom took a really long time

to accept first that i'm gay, then that i'm engaged to a person who is not a man, and then also the things having do with gender, my partner is non- binary trans masculine and my mother, for her, all of this it seems like too much. but, i love her and almost every time i visit her i have to say, i love you and you love me and you're going to have to let me this way. and, it's been working. >> thank you so much.

spent tonight on book to be starting at eight eastern, highlights from our in-depth program, we begin with them on a pair, author of a number of books, among them a history of the black national anthem, and breathe. that's followed by novelist jody including her novel, spark of light, journalists and science fiction novelist discusses his books and activism. after a day of social distancing, get close to good book tonight. but to be on c-span2. >> please stand has round-the-clock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic and it's all available on demand c-span.org/coronavirus. watch white house briefings, dates from governors and state officials come attractive spread throughout the u.s. and the world with interactive maps. watch on demand any time,