Amanda Quintero Aguerrevere is the author of the new memoir Unfiltered: From the Feed to the Page, Stories of Wanderlust. She also has written the book We Said Farewell. She is an economist, and she is originally from Venezuela.
Q: What inspired you to write Unfiltered?
A: I love writing. For a long time I had blogged and contributed to columns and had to put a stop to it because I didn't have the time to commit to weekly pieces, so I came up with a simple creative outlet: write short pieces that would fit inside Instagram captions and share them with friends.
I kept that going for a long time, and eventually I realised most of them were travel-related. In hindsight, traveling is one of my all-time favorite activities and one that brings me into the present moment so I can notice the little things that happen outside myself.
Therefore, Unfiltered as a travel memoir happened as a consequence of my journaling/writing habits.
Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: Many of the anecdotes featured in Unfiltered portray the unpolished elements of travel. The chaos, being under prepared, doing something irresponsible, witnessing something heartbreaking, or even being sick.
I thought “unfiltered” was a good play between “candid” and “non-filtered” referring to Instagram (as most of the stories first lived as Insta captions).
Q: How did you choose the music to accompany the essays?
A: Since the pieces are coming out of Instagram, I thought it would be fun to preserve the elements of an Instagram post: soundtrack, text and hashtags. I selected songs that match the vibe of the piece, either because they are geographically linked or relate to the topic in question.
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: For me, and I hope that's also the case for my readers, it was a creative project for fun, entertainment, and amusement. It was a way to encapsulate a time period, honor travel stories, make others travel with me or reminisce on their own travel experiences.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Still noodling on it.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Unfiltered is my second book. My first book came out in 2023 and was translated to English in 2024. It's titled We Said Farewell.
It is a collection of five stories, first accounts of folks from Venezuela--my country of origin--and the way they lived through a tumultuous period, deciding to leave everything behind and start over far away from a country that collapsed.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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