Interview with Natalia Sylvester
Natalia Sylvester was kind enough to answer some questions for us about her writing and Italian heritage.
1. How has being Italian American shaped your writing?
I love this question first and foremost because I've never been asked it; it's not often that immigrants in the US are embraced with their full heritage, so I've always been known and self-identified as a Peruvian American writer, despite also having Italian ancestry. Part of that is also because I've never really given myself permission to take up that space—identity when you're part of a diaspora is so complicated, and there are always questions of are we enough? How many generations back "counts"? We can often suppress (or are forced to suppress) parts of ourselves out of a need to un-complicate our identities when they struggle to fit into the narrow definitions imposed on us. So to say that I'm really touched and appreciative of being welcomed in this space, and having this part of my identity embraced, is an understatement.
I think that sums up how it's shaped my writing: I'm very much fascinated by migration and the way its paths shape our histories and identities. I've mostly written about migration within the context of the US but that is not the only way I think of it, and I'm always shocked when people do. Years ago, I was invited to a live storytelling event, so I wrote a story about my Nonna's alfajores and afterwards, someone came up to me and asked, very incredulously, "How does a Peruvian writer end up calling their grandmother Nonna?!" And so I told them about my family history, but it occurred to me that this person had never considered that people from other countries might also migrate to countries other than the US. In my writing, I often think about the pieces of our pasts scattered across the earth. How does it shape our sense of belonging? Can we belong to a place even if we're unsure that we have been fully embraced as belonging? Is that something inherent? Is it earned? Is it passed down to us?
2. I always say that there is more to us than mafia and meatballs. If there was one thing you wanted people to take away from your books about being Italian what would it be?
To be very honest, I haven't explored these things specifically in my books yet. I think again, because it comes down to visibility, representation, and what is normalized in books, answering these questions is actually really enlightening for me! For example, even calling my characters' grandparents "Abuelos" is only reflective of my paternal family dynamics; on my mother's side, it's always been Nonnos, but I've never depicted that in a story because I felt I'd have to explain so much of that to readers: how there's actually a huge Italian population in Peru because so many of us share a migration history, and so of course, we'd bring those parts of ourselves here to the US as well. For me, it's in how we speak to each other, the family stories we tell, the family recipes we pass down. Perhaps I'd want people to take away that it doesn't look any one particular way.
3. What are some of the themes that you want to share in your books?
I'm obsessed with memory, perhaps because so much of it is lost to us when we migrate. I wish I knew more of my great-grandfather's story, of why he left Genoa for Lima, and when my grandfather passed away in 2018 it felt like even more of our history was lost to us. So a theme I explore, especially in Everyone Knows You Go Home, is what happens with the unknown? How do we fill in those gaps? Does not knowing the full story of our ancestors mean we're not still of them? Can we not still honor them, keep their memory alive, and somehow make them proud, even with the limited tangibles we have? I'd like to think we can.
4. Are there any books or movies by Italians or Italian Americans that you recommend?
One of my all-time favorite books, that I remember reading when I was in the process of writing Everyone Knows You Go Home, is The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano. Another book that I highly recommend, that I often still think about because it's so sweeping in scope and especially the themes I mention in this interview, is How Fires End by Marco Rafalà.
Be sure to pick up your copy of our book of the month Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalia Sylvester.