Description

---

What does it take for a woman to succeed as a writer? In these revealing interviews, first published in 1988 as Historias íntimas, ten of Latin America's most important women writers explore this question with scholar Magdalena García Pinto, discussing the personal, social, and political factors that have shaped their writing careers.

The authors interviewed are Isabel Allende, Albalucía Angel, Rosario Ferré, Margo Glantz, Sylvia Molloy, Elvira Orphée, Elena Poniatowska, Marta Traba, Luisa Valenzuela, and Ida Vitale. In intimate dialogues with each author, García Pinto draws out the formative experiences of her youth, tracing the pilgrimage that led each to a distinguished writing career.

The writers also reflect on their published writings, discussing the creative process in general and the motivating force behind individual works. They candidly discuss the problems they have faced in writing and the strategies that enabled them to reach their goals.

While obviously of interest to readers of Latin American literature, this book has important insights for students of women's literature and cultural studies, as well as for aspiring writers.

About the Author

---

Magdalena García Pinto is Associate Professor Emerita of Spanish at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Trudy Balch (1956–2010) was a translator specializing in Spanish and Ladino.

Praise For…

---

These are some of the best interviews with writers I have read, not just tools to be used by the critic to glean facts or insights that can then be applied to the 'real' object, the literary text, but textured, nutty, flavorful stories, a pleasure to read for their own sake. Passages from each writer's work are woven into the text so that we move between stories about reading to our own readings of their texts and are left wanting more.
— Signs

... a fine introduction to voices that—aside from Isabel Allende's—remain largely unknown here.
— Washington Post Book World

These are candid, intimate, wonderfully structured interviews, whose impressive impact reveals the interviewer's considerable skill, as well as her thorough knowledge of the writings of her subjects.... Highly recommended...
— Choice