Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

by Valeria Luiselli

It is not even the American Dream that they pursue, but rather the more modest aspiration to wake up from the nightmare into which they were born.

Because—how do you explain that it is never inspiration that drives you to tell a story, but rather a combination of anger and clarity? How do you say: No, we do not find inspiration here, but we find a country that is as beautiful as it is broken, and we are somehow now part of it, so we are also broken with it, and feel ashamed, confused, and sometimes hopeless, and are trying to figure out how to do something about all that.