Please help me welcome Belinda Acosta to Books and Needlepoint today - She is my guest blogger! She is currently on a virtual tour with her debut novel - Damas, Dramas and Ana Ruiz.
Another interviewer asked me where I appear In Damas, Dramas, and Ana Ruiz. After we talked, she suggested that I am present in Carmen and her cousin Bianca. Carmen is the angry quinceañera in the book—the one who assumes that her mother is to blame for her father’s departure. As it turns out, the interviewer was on to something. I always assumed it was my mother’s doing when my own parents split when I was young. After writing this book, I wonder why my mother didn’t suffocate me in my sleep. I was a moody teenager, and yes, a daddy’s girl. No doubt about it. Still am. Bianca is the lively one, always ready to try something new, always ready to give it her best shot. I felt like it was the Bianca in me that decided to write Damas, Dramas, and Ana Rui
z. Bianca has her own drama with her mother, a secondary story line that rings true for me as well. Overall, the thing that made me get to the center of the teenagers in the book is that sick, sad moment when you discover that your parents are just human, with their own foibles and faults. But the things I’ve come to appreciate about parents, mine and others, is the extraordinary level of patience they must muster, how it’s tested again and again, and how you sometimes have to watch your kid fail in order to allow them to grow.
I don’t have children but I think I’m a pretty cool aunt. I mentor children in the public schools here in Austin, and I am a Godmother to one child. I might make a good mother now that I have the benefit of hindsight, but all in all, I think it’s good that my contact with children has been at a distance. When it comes right down to it, that’s the perfect place from which to observe and write about this most primary of relationships, between mother and child.
3 comments:
This guest post made me chuckle - I bet the author's loads of fun!
Definitely amusing post ~ esp. the part about wondering why her "mother didn't suffocate [her]" when she was a moody teen. I'm going to pick up the book and after I read it give it to my still sometimes moody 26-year old daughter. :)
I suspect we were most of us moody teens in our day. It's strange isn't it, that moment when we realize our parents were once like us and we might become them. Sounds like you convey the feelings of teenagerhood very well in your novel.
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