Photo by Sharona Jacobs
Juliet Faithfull is the author of the new novel Liar's Dice. She is also a psychotherapist. She grew up in Brazil, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Q: How much did your twin sister, Mita, inspire you to write Liar's Dice?
A: Mita was always there in the background, the whisper of her. So were Brazil and Rio. I started writing this novel from a place of missing and longing but also as a way to “matar saudades”—a Brazilian expression that literally means to kill one’s missing.
In writing the novel, I could have a twin sister, and be with the music, the natural beauty and rhythms of Rio. The scenes just began to pour out and I collected them. None of them are autobiographical, but the inspiration came from having had a disabled twin sister and from growing up in Brazil during the dictatorship.
Q: You’ve written about having a form of amnesia--can you tell us about that, and about how memory affected the writing of the novel?
A: I do not remember the first nine years of my life, when my twin sister lived with us in rural Brazil. I went back to the village, hoping to recover my memory, but I couldn’t. Everything looked familiar but I didn’t recognize any of it.
It saddens me that I do not remember (consciously) my own identical twin sister. I had to invent her the same way I invented Sofia, and Andrea and the other fictional characters… I do remember the Mita in the hospital, later, when we were older and went to visit her.
Recently (after I’d finished revising my novel and sent it out), I found a box of slides from my childhood. I was shocked to discover that my twin was never in a wheelchair, the way I portrayed it in the novel. I saw a photo of her standing up, in the hospital. I couldn’t believe it! Apparently the wheelchair came later.
I wonder now if wrote her in a wheelchair to explain (or excuse) my parent’s decision to send her away…
Q: The author Sandra Cisneros said of the book, “I hesitate to call anything this beautiful ‘magic.’ It’s more than that; it’s a sacred healing.” What do you think of that description?
A: I was blown away by that description. And honored. Sandra Cisneros is a hero of mine.
Dolores is coming of age at the height of Brazil’s military dictatorship, when there was widespread censorship, torture and repression. The House on Mango Street has been banned in many states. The themes in Liar’s Dice are more relevant today than I ever imagined they would be.
Dolores’ journey to literacy involves facing the horrors of the dictatorship, as well as the grief about her disabled sister. The characters in the book resist these injustices in various ways. A bookstore owner has secret room where he keeps banned books and records. After being targeted by the police for being trans, Sofia turns a fashion show into a political statement.
There are many references in the book to songs that were banned, and others where the lyrics have double meanings, to evade censorship. In Liar’s Dice, books (and poems) save lives.
I think the “sacred healing” Sandra Cisneros found in my book comes from the fierce love Dolores feels for her twin sister, and the joy, the friendships and the spirit of resistance she finds—a hope and a solidarity that the dictatorship cannot kill.
Q: As you noted, the novel is set in Brazil in the 1970s--how important is setting to you in your writing?
A: Crucial. Rio is almost a character in the book. I wanted to capture the beauty, the rhythm and the violence of that city.
The novel opens as Dolores looks out the school window at the Statue of Christ. She observes that he faces the glitzy neighborhoods of Leblon and Ipanema and doesn’t notice the favelas, the poverty and the dirt, because they are “under his armpits.”
1970s Brazil was a country of contradictions. There was Pelé, Bossa Nova, a booming economy which was dubbed the “Brazilian Miracle.” That was the official image.
At the same time, the poverty rate was 68 percent and almost half the country was illiterate. These disparities are obvious to Dolores as she looks out of her classroom window.
Dolores’ family moves from a small rural village to Rio and lives in the fancy neighborhood of Ipanema. In contrast, her friend Andrea lives in Lapa, the red-light area. The plot of the novel takes place in these very different worlds.
After her twin is sent away, Dolores’ parents never speak about her. It’s as if she’d never existed. The silence in the family echoes the silence in the country, where people disappear and bodies are found under bridges, but no one talks.
The political situation in Brazil in 1970 is also central to the story. It was the height of the military dictatorship, and repression, censorship and torture were widespread. Dolores grows up in this atmosphere of danger and secrecy and, in her quest to find her twin, she encounters the violence of the dictatorship.
So, the contradictions and forces of 1970s Brazil mirror and magnify her inner quest; her refusal to forget her sister and pretend everything is fine parallels the efforts of many of the characters to quietly defy the dictatorship.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I have two very different ideas that I’m playing with. I’m a bit hesitant to go into details, because I’m still cooking them…I don’t plan when I write, so I have to feel (and write) my way in.
One of them involves two children, a boy and a girl, on opposite sides of the Spanish civil war, and how Franco’s ideas about gender and school affected them. I found out recently that my mother is illiterate partly because of those policies.
Another idea explores three different women in different time periods who have glass eyes. This one is still amorphous, but it involves exploring a sense of the uncanny as well as beauty/deformity.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: There was a time when Macumba (an Afro-Brazilian religion) was a bigger part of the novel. It’s still a little bit there, in the village scenes. I cut those scenes out because they involved a lot world-building; many American readers would probably not be familiar with the various gods involved. I wonder sometimes, if this was a mistake.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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