![]() Talking to Alvarez, who is now 48 and lives with her husband on their farm in Middlebury, Vt., you feel a similar vibe - here's a serious woman who refuses to take herself, or anything else, too seriously. Her work is rich, funny, full of feeling. The great thing about Alvarez's fiction has always been this: Even when she's probing difficult themes, she doesn't have a pretentious bone in her body. She also delves into deeper, more personal subjects, like her decision not to have children. Alvarez writes here about her large, boisterous and politically active family her difficult move to the United States and her attempts to learn a new language her years of bouncing from teaching job to teaching job, wondering if her fiction would ever see the light of day. Part memoir and part how-to text for aspiring writers, it's a lucid, light-as-a-butterfly book that pencils in the real stories behind Alvarez's fictions. This month Alvarez publishes her first nonfiction book, a collection of essays titled "Something to Declare" (Algonquin). The twin themes of persecution and exile percolate through much of Alvarez's artfully constructed fiction, including the critically acclaimed novels "How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents" (1991), "In the Time of Butterflies" (1994) and "Yo!" (1997). Her father, who had been involved in a coup attempt against dictator Rafael Trujillo, was in grave danger - within a few months, many of his co-conspirators would be killed. Julia Alvarez was 10 years old when her family was forced to flee the Dominican Republic for the United States. ![]()
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