![]() ![]() “It was very long, and I abandoned it for the good of all humanity,” she laughs. ![]() In search of a new life in Milpitas, she joins her uncle Pol and his family: his wife Paz, and Roni, his eight-year-old daughter, who was born in the US.Ĭastillo began writing America is Not the Heart as a quite different story. Disowned by her wealthy parents in the Philippines after quitting college and devoting her 20s to revolutionary guerrilla group the New People’s Army, Hero was later captured by the army, held and tortured in an internment camp for two years. Hero De Vera, the dominant narrator, is in her mid-30s when she arrives to Milpitas, in San Francisco’s Bay Area. I’m Filipino American, I’m a woman, I’m bi, and all of those things inform my life and my writing, and I don’t think those things diminish my life or my writing.” And having just written an extraordinary debut novel with Filipino American, bisexual women at its core, Castillo is claiming their right to literary universality in the process.Īmerica Is Not the Heart is an epic, intergenerational story following several women in one family. “I’m not one of those writers who’s like: ‘I just want to be thought of as a writer,’” she says. ![]() D on’t be afraid of trying to pigeonhole Elaine Castillo. ![]()
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