Author Julia Alvarez on Being an American Master

In the front yard of her childhood home in the Dominican Republic, renowned poet and novelist Julia Alvarez recalls how her papito taught her to do the latest dance craze: the twist. "It was just dreamy, magical," Alvarez says of her upbringing in "Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined," the new American Masters documentary premiering Tuesday, Sept. 17, on PBS. "It's often surprising to me that we were living in a horrid dictatorship."

In 1960, at age 10, Alvarez fled the tyrannical government of Rafael Trujillo ("El Jefe") with her three sisters, well-to-do mother and her father, a dissident involved in a failed attempt to overthrow the dictator, and immigrated to the United States. She went to boarding school at Abbot Academy in Massachusetts, where she began writing poetry.

Alvarez read Keates, Milton and Shakespeare. However, she contends that it wasn't until college that she became serious about writing — particularly after attending the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Vermont's Middlebury College. Writing and reciting poetry, she explains, became her world — "an obsession, really" — and she developed her own personal style, which she describes as "speaking Spanish in English."

Years later, alone in the tower room at the Yaddo summer retreat in New York, Alvarez reached a turning point. She'd been attempting to write with the same gravitas as her British literary heroes, to no avail, when she became distracted by the cleaning staff outside her door. She went downstairs to the kitchen to talk with them, and suddenly realized that these were stories she was after: "The lore that comes when women are talking as they're doing their housework."

Alvarez continued to pursue and expand on these accounts, the seemingly everyday experiences of Latinas, and eventually earned acclaim not just for her poetry but fiction, with the loosely autobiographical "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" and subsequently, "In the Time of the Butterflies," based on the tragic story of the Dominican Republic's martyred Mirabal sisters. Currently, 74-year-old Alvarez is the author of six novels, three poetry collections, over 10 children's books and three non-fiction books. 

"Because she's a poet, the way she writes her fiction is so lyrical," novelist Helena Maria Viramontes explains in the documentary. In person, Alvarez comes across as more of a straight-shooter — unpretentious, funny, concise — which makes her not just a worthy, but engaging, subject on screen.
"Julia never lets an argument go," Andriana Bosch, the documentary's award-winning director and producer explained to Next Avenue in a recent interview. More excerpts from that conversation with both Alvarez and Bosch, which ran over its allotted time ("We're not used to shutting up," joked Bosch. "Maybe you should take a cue from the presidential debate and shut off our microphones," Alvarez quipped.) have been edited for length and clarity below.

Alvarez: I was really reluctant at first, when my agent presented the idea of a documentary. I thought, 'You know what? To get everybody off my back, I'll say yes. It'll never get funded.' And then it happened.

Bosch: I had met Julia years before, and I was totally nervous. She was wrapped in this shawl — Julia is always somewhat wrapped. She walks in, and she sits there, this almost other-worldly human saying incredible things, having this spin on experiences that are not so uncommon, certainly not for Latinos, but she's talking about them in a way that is just so mesmerizing. I was enchanted.

Alvarez: I didn't know what was going to be in the film. I was never informed. I couldn't micromanage or airbrush. So it was like having all these dots in my head and trying to connect them. 

Bosch: People keep asking me, 'why did you make this documentary,' and I have a very innocent answer, a truthful one: I just wanted to share the pleasure of Julia's company with as many people as I could. And it really is a pleasure. If I could rename this documentary and everybody wasn't so pretentious, I would name it 'The Pleasure of Your Company.'

Alvarez: I like that better!

Alvarez: When we went, everybody was, '¿Y la película?' 'Where's the movie?' 'When can we watch the movie?' They never paid any attention to my books, except that they'd seen them in the papers, but they wanted to know when they could watch the movie — and now I can tell them.

Bosch: We start by meeting Julia backwards. Isn't that fitting? Isn't that very 'Garcia Girls?' We follow her through her childhood in the Dominican Republic. I think it's the beating heart of this film. It roots the piece in reality, it's what elevates it, it's unique. 

Alvarez: I was always afraid that it would feel a little artificial and it didn't. Of course, you have to understand Dominicans. It's a very performative culture. So people were right there, ready to be on camera. I didn't see any shyness from any relative. Remember when we trespassed into the estate of the former dictator? 

Bosch: Oh God, we did. 

Alvarez: And all of a sudden the guardia comes up and I don't know if he had a gun or what. And he says, 'You're not supposed to be here.' And then we sweet-talked our way into exploring the space. We got gutsy. 

Bosch: [Laughs]

Alvarez: And it was a good crew, a combination of locals and people that came from the States. It mirrored my history, which is a combination of North and South America. That's why I call myself all-American. I used to think it was the blonde, blue-eyed cheerleaders that were all-American girls. And then I figured out, they're not all-American girls. I am. I've combined all of the hemispheres in who I am, both North and South.

Credit: PBS

Alvarez: It's really hard for a writer to give the narrative to someone else. That's what we do. We are in charge of the narrative. And it's especially hard when you're the protagonist. Suddenly, the camera's turned on you. You think, 'Oh, I shouldn't have said that.' 'Oh, how could I have done that?' 'Oh dear, she put too much makeup on me.' Everything. 

Bosch: There is this sort of contradiction. You put your character in a difficult conundrum because on the one hand, they're supposed to see [the film] and they're supposed to support it. On the other hand, they were never consulted about the story you told. 

Alvarez: And there are hard moments. My sisters come on and, as Kamala would say, 'the old playbook' comes up, painful moments that have been resolved with time. But they were marched out again. And I knew something was up because as soon as Adriana and her crew left, I got a phone call from my sisters. They were together and they said, 'Don't get mad.' I said, 'Oh my God.' But it's my comeuppance. Say what you want! Of course I wanted them to say, 'We're so proud of her. We've always loved her stories,' which would be BS.

Bosch: I mean, for me, you meet this person, you become familiar with this person, and you either like this person or you don't. I'll say it again: it was a pleasure. I end my emails to Julia with, 'Enchanted to Meet You.' 

Alvarez: Encantada.

Bosch: ¡Encantada conocerte! Which is like, what's her name, [sings] 'I was enchanted to meet you' … Taylor Swift!

Alvarez: But I think what Adriana was trying to do, and did very successfully, is create a mosaic. Not hagiography, a kind of love fest, where you take everything out that doesn't benefit your character. And I recognize that it's hard to have a writer in the family. I mean, whenever [my sisters and I] would get together, we'd sit up late at night, gossiping. And each of their stories would be prefaced with, 'Don't you ever write about this!' And I would say, 'Then don't tell me.' If I start thinking, 'Don't,' I'm walking on a minefield. I would just censor myself to death. I couldn't do that.

Bosch: You construct a character from that person's own view of themselves, what they've written, what they've said, as well as other people's views of them. But then you inevitably bring your own experiences into the film, and it becomes personal. This idea that you can stand outside of what you're doing is questionable. 

Alvarez: As my meditation teacher tells us every time, 'Don't take your feelings personally.' And when I saw this documentary for the first time, I was taking it personally. Later, I could see it as other people would see it. I could see it as, well, not about me, but a me through the lens of another storyteller. I keep telling Adriana that this film is her novel. I was just raw material. 

Bosch: During this process, I learned an immense amount of stuff — particularly about the nature of dictatorships, how they land on society's women. If that's not a current topic, nothing is. 

You have a bunch of novels that speak about the dictator and the patriarchy. Julia turns that upside down and says, 'I'm not going to tell the story from the point of view of the dictator; I'm going to tell the story from the point of view of the victims.' And the victims happen to be women. I would say that is probably going to be a lasting contribution of Julia to literature.

Alvarez: Everything she says is lovely, but it's everything that I have to forget when I sit down to write. Because you have to have that beginner's mind. It doesn't matter that you've written other things in the past, successful or not. You have to learn how to write the book you're writing now. You have to sort of forget. It's why I write downstairs. There's no PR there, there's no trophies, there's no medals. It has to be just me and the work in that moment. 

Bosch: You can see Julia's writing shift, especially with 'Afterlife.' I did not read 'Afterlife' — I inhaled it. I was floored by it. You still have a Latina protagonist. But the theme of the novel is such a universal theme: it's about aging. It's about loss. Aging is a shared thing, no matter what culture you're in. And this book just hit me in a different way than her earlier books. It dealt with my life now and the things that I'm going through — and from such a wonderful, and in the end, optimistic point of view. 

Alvarez: One of the things that I've felt and been so moved by lately is, 'Wow, you have really come on a journey.' You have to thank all those past selves for not giving up because it was crazy. For someone of my background — 1950s, the Dominican Republic, a woman in a very strict, conservative family — for me to think I could become a writer and have a public voice in a language that wasn't even my mother tongue? How the hell did I think I could do that? 

Bosch: I'm not sure if I got too poetic in the documentary about trying to build something out of the pieces you are left with after all the losses of old age inevitably happen. But here is a writer who transformed herself, walked with change, and was able to engage with each phase of life and give us something brilliant.

Alvarez: All along the way, I've had a lot of helpers, but I've also had a lot of naysayers. And I hope that people watching this who feel the same kind of passion for something, and have encountered any kind of difficulty or suggestion that they can't possibly dream of doing that thing, I hope they don't give up. Don't give up. Especially little girls like Adriana and I were, who think something like this is not going to happen for them: think again.

Sabrina Crews 
Sabrina Crews is a public media journalist and former reporting fellow with the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center and Columbia Journalism School.  Read More