We chat with author Xochitl Gonzalez about Last Night in Brooklyn, which is a captivating story about a young woman whose life becomes ensnared in her glamorous neighbor’s secret past. PLUS you can also listen to an excerpt from the audiobook below too!
Hi, Xochitl! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Such a big question! Ok, I’m a native Brooklynite; I grew up in a very working class family in South Brooklyn. I was raised by my grandparents, and so now most of my family that’s alive is chosen. I have been blessed with the greatest friends, many of whom have been in my life for decades. I came to writing in mid-life. (Encouraged by my friends.) I started my first business– a luxury wedding planning company– when i was 23, and started and ran a couple of small businesses– mainly in the service industry– with my best friend over the following like 16 or 17 years? I started writing seriously when I was 40 and I started my MFA at Iowa when I was 41.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
When I was 9, I won the Brooklyn Storytelling Contest, but i got shut out in the Citywide competition. So the next year I came back bigger and stronger and took New York! Ha. This was mainly oral stories that you memorized– folk tales and that kind of thing. But I loved the library and I lived at the Brooklyn Public Library. And then in high school we had this competition and we’d make up musicals every year. It was called SING. And that was my first “writing experience.” I wrote the scripts and songs for that for four years. And i wrote stories in high school. And then I didn’t write again until the early aughts when I started a blog about wedding planning.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.
- The one that made you want to become an author: It didn’t happen for me that way. I decided to become an author when I was 40 and finally had some financial security and was shopping for a discount top for a business meeting at Nordstrom Rack. And it hit me: “I think you could write a book.”
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: I think about Troubling Love by Elena Ferrante all the time (not lighting but… somehow it is related to Chisel Beach, because then I always start thinking about that book. And now lately, somehow they all are also related to Quiara Alegra Hudes’ novel, The White Hot. There’s a whole thing there and I need to read them all again.)
Your latest novel, Last Night in Brooklyn, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Community, ambition, greed, amor fou!
What can readers expect?
A very sweeping story that moves quickly and drops you into another place and time, but where the full meaning might hit you after you are done. I think its meant to feel like a really important night in your twenties… It sticks with you and you should churn it over a few times when its done.
Where did the inspiration for Last Night in Brooklyn come from?
It started with L’Wren Scott’s suicide. And how hard it is to have a fashion business, or any creative business. But especially as a woman. Then, I saw a gender swapped production of Company and it got me thinking about other stories that I love that really rest on being male driven. And I was thinking about Gatsby. And how Nick just tells that story like such a man. And Gatsby thinks such male things will win Daisy over… and i got to thinking of how that would be gender swapped.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
There is a scene where Marla goes to Garza’s house to confront her about a blind item that was in Page Six, and I loved writing that scene. I spent so much time on the staging of that scene. Physically mapping that. Garza’s whole life was based on a building a friend of mine owned and had made into two lofts… so I had the view from that rooftop really in my mind. And I love Garza, tremendously. But I also love Marla, whose husband Garza had a past with. She comes off as one thing, but really is another.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
The ending. The frame of the whole thing, because there’s a bit of retrospection and so its like, WHY? Why is Alicia thinking about this now? I struggled with that a lot. And then thankfully i was knocked out with Covid while in the middle of a revision and I stumbled on this documentary on YouTube called “Battle for Brooklyn” and… well the Barclays’ Center had been in the book. But not the way that it is now. And that was the key. Really. Then it had this bigger thing. I’m so indebted to that film.
The audiobook is narrated by Elizabeth Rodriguez, who is best known for her role as Aleida Diaz in Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black. What was it like hearing the narration for the first time?
I met Elizabeth when we were casting the pilot for Olga, and I fell in love with her. I had already seen her off Broadway in a number of plays, but most especially “Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven.” And Aleida was a tough character, but in real life Elizabeth is so elegant and soft. And so I want to say that hearing her narrate was everything I had hoped and more.
Was there a chapter or scene that really came to life with the narration or one you really enjoyed?
That whole second to last chapter of the book, which is kind of devastating. So much of this book is on the move.. and the whole sequence of Alicia trying to go to a movie and then going to Soul Summit and just dancing out her feelings in the middle Fort Greene Park? That was really something.
What’s next for you?
I just literally turned in my first non-fiction book, which is going to come out next year. It’s called Need Blind: A Memoir of Social Class in America. It’s really personal, but also deeply researched and reported, and I left it all on the dancefloor for this one, so I think I’m gonna take a beat and do something just kind of fun next. I have an idea for a play. Let’s see.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
I am both done with a year of reading about class for this book and on a blurbing sabbatical, and I am just giddy for some reading freedom!! My plan is to kind of dig in the crates, so to speak, this summer. I want to get to “back list bangers” that I just missed for whatever reason. As soon as this tour is over, I’m starting Housekeeping. I’ve never read it. My friend Eddie gave out books for his 50th birthday, he picked what everybody got, and I got Charming Billy, so I’m going to read that. And while there are Morrison novels I’ve read multiple times, I am mortified to say that somehow I never read Song of Solomon, and that correction needs to be made.
Will you be picking up Last Night In Brooklyn? Tell us in the comments below!
