I wrote The Wild Ones with memories of my adolescence as part of a violent community in my hometown of Monterrey, and also with the memory of a very complicated area on the outskirts of my city that I got to know around that time.
That place is called El Peñón, located at the foothills of Cerro de la Silla, an emblematic mountain of my city. The houses are clustered on the slopes, next to ravines, among the rocks. Poverty is severe there, and the needs are many.
In the summer of 1999, I drove over the Cousane Gap and, cresting the narrow mountain road, laid eyes on Beara for the first time - the glory of its mountains, valleys, forests and bays stretched all the way to the distant horizon. I was in West Cork to make a start on this thing called writing-a-book that I’d been stewing over for ten years or more. By the time I got to Eyeries at the tip of peninsula, I was head over heels in love. Huge banks of clouds roiled over the Atlantic before scudding across the shimmering expanse of Bantry Bay.
Are we who we are because of the country we were born in, the parents we were born to, the social class we belong to?
Or is it because of our lived experiences, our childhood, the things that happen to us and shape our lives?
Or is there something else beneath it all, something deep down, a distinctiveness that defines us and makes us unique?
Sometimes people want to know where writers get ideas from. That question always gets me thinking. Where do I really get ideas from? I also ask writer friends the same. I get the impression, every time, that we don’t really know. It’s part of the mystery of writing. And it’s great that it is so. I don’t believe there’s a mechanism to get ideas. Or some kind of imaginary pond, where we can fish a silvery, slippery fish-idea. That would be great, since I would know, as a writer, that I definitely will get new ideas.
In 2014, I read a news article about the suffering of separated child refugees in Calais whose numbers had risen to nearly a thousand. I found it shameful that just twenty-one miles from the coast of Britain there were children and teenagers living in tents and makeshift shelters in the degrading cold, filth and disease of a refugee camp called ‘The Jungle’ and along the Pas-de-Calais coast.
Salem, Massachusetts is the birthplace of illustrious figures, including writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. And for me the most important of these is Sarah Parker Remond, an obstetrician, human rights activist and feminist; a woman of great culture, a Black woman who sought freedom at a time when this was difficult for Black people (and for women), in the United States and elsewhere. Sarah was born in Salem and died in Rome on 13 December 1894, aged just 68, in a hospital that no longer exists, the Hospital of San Antonio.
I’m so happy that my mother’s incisive, beautiful books are being rediscovered by a whole new generation. As well as being her daughter, I am her literary executor.
In my early teens I became aware of a strange phenomenon in my neighbourhood. On the August bank holiday, groups of Caribbean women could be seen walking in the middle of the road to some unknown destination. Always colourfully dressed, they tended to be Dominican or St Lucian and chatted away in French patois, which was incomprehensible to me, a Jamaican, but recognisable because I lived next door to a Dominican family. These people were, I learned eventually, heading to Ladbroke Grove.
I’m always astonished by the fact that books ever get written. How is it done? How does anyone write a book? The process seems impossible. An enterprise beyond my comprehension. It fascinates and frightens me because it appears so alien. The mere idea of putting pen to paper is a psychological mountain that is utterly petrifying.
Writing a third novel in a trilogy is always problematic for the author. Will the new novel hit the heights of the previous two, will it dip and fizzle out in the opinion of the readers? Endings are after all more memorable than beginnings.
