Vermont author Julia Alvarez started to pen her 23rd book — Alma once had a friend, a writer, who … — when the threat of Covid-19 momentarily stopped her. “Being older, there’s always a sense of, ‘Will this be my last work?’” the 74-year-old self-described aspiring “elder” recalled in a recent interview. “During the pandemic, a bright light was shone on all of us now termed ‘the vulnerable.’ Suddenly, my demographic was endangered.” Even so, the onetime Dominican Republic student turned professor emerita at Middlebury College returned to crafting her novel about a similarly aged retired woman of letters ruminating on what to do with a lifetime of unfinished rough drafts. To close a story, the old people back home would utter a chant. Colorín colorado, este cuento se ha acabado. This tale is done. Release the duende to the wind. But how to exorcize a story that had never been told? Then in an all-too-actual plot twist, Alvarez’s retina detached from one of her eyes. The Weybridge writer endured two surgeries. After, her sight remained clouded as she struggled to continue her work in progress. So, it’s a true story, not like you made it up? It was a question readers often asked. Alma was weary of explaining that a novelist should not subject herself to the tyranny of what really happened. She herself couldn’t always separate the strands of real life, as it was called, from pure invention.
Slowly learning how to navigate her new visual reality, Alvarez went on to finish the book, which she has titled “The Cemetery of Untold Stories.” Set for release in English and Spanish this week, the 256-page work has already landed on several most-anticipated reading lists, including those of NBC’s “Today” show and The New York Times.
“Mystifying, compelling, and often wryly funny,” the trade publication Shelf Awareness has summed up the novel. “Julia Alvarez delivers a lyrical, thought-provoking meditation on truth, complicated family narratives, and the question of whose stories get told.”