Guest post by The Broke Hearts author Matt Mendez
Matt Mendez is the author of Barely Missing Everything, his debut novel, and the short story collection Twitching Heart. Barely Missing Everything has been called a “searing portrait of two Mexican-American families” by Publishers Weekly and “accessible and artful” in a stared review by Kirkus. The New York Times says [Mendez] “has an uncanny ability to capture the aimless bluster of young boys posturing at confidence.”
Like many of his characters Matt grew up in El Paso, Texas and continues to love and live in the Southwest, now in Tucson, Arizona. He is a military veteran and earned his MFA from the University of Arizona where he has taught creative writing. Matt is the father of two daughters that he loves fiercely.
Releasing on October 3rd, The Broke Hearts is the piercing follow up to Barely Missing Everything , JD and Danny, still reeling from the gutting death of their best friend by police gunfire, grapple with life-changing decisions and the kind of people they want to be, for Juan.
Ever since I was in high school, I wanted to be a filmmaker. I love movies and remember falling hard when Omni Video opened a block from my house as a teen. I used to walk to there almost every day; the owner played movies and didn’t mind me hanging out to watch as long as I occasionally rented one. Omni Video was like a library: I watched horror and sci-fi classics like Silver Bullet, The Evil Dead, and They Live. I discovered I was way more into werewolves and demons and aliens taking over the planet than my English teachers’ selections of romantic-tragedies like Romeo and Juliet or The Great Gatsby.
I didn’t like to read. The books I was assigned in school were painfully hard to get through. The settings were always in Europe—or the East coast—and the characters talked like vocabulary homework. I found my attention drifting while slogging through all the wherefore art thous, skipping pages and then quitting altogether. It wasn’t until college—where I studied film—that I read a book and actually liked it.
I’d been taking a creative writing course that I thought would help with screenwriting and read The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. At the time I was in my mid-twenties, had just served four years in the military and been on two deployments, and never had I identified so deeply with a book or its protagonist, the twelve-year-old Esperanza Cordero. Reading The House on Mango Street was the first time a novel made me feel. I shared Esperanza’s experiences, related them to my own. Recognized myself in her. It was life changing. As a kid I never thought I could love a book, but — I loved that book.
I started going to bookstores soon after and it wasn’t long until I felt like that kid in Omni Video. I discovered Dagoberto Gilb and Luis Alberto Urrea, Helena Maria Viramontes and Denise Chavez. Then Salvador Plascencia and Eduardo Galeano, Samanta Schewblin and Roberto Bolaño, Isabel Quintero, and Manuel Muñoz. After finishing my undergrad, I changed gears and pursued fiction writing, realizing the stories I wanted to tell were on the page, and the emotional reactions and connections I wanted to create were like the ones Cisneros had been able to create for me.
My first book, Twitching Heart, was a collection of short stories, most of it written while I was in grad school. It was published by a small press that no longer exists, my ten stories—at least for now—lost and unreachable to readers. The characters in Twitching Heart all live in El Paso, Texas, specifically in Central, the neighborhood where I grew up and return to in most of my fiction. The stories were written for adults, most of them about men with hard lives made harder by their inexplicable choices. But even before the indie press shuttered, the collection seemed destined to be out of the reach of the readers I most wanted to find. Readers who’d once been like me, Brown boys who didn’t read books.
Still, after making the switch from filmmaking student to writer, I didn’t think about writing for young people. YA wasn’t something I knew too much about and at the time would have guessed—wrongly—that most YA books were either Harry Potter, Nancy Drew or Sweet Valley High paperbacks. It wasn’t until after Twitching Heart had been published and my agent and I were talking about my next project, my debut novel Barely Missing Everything, and who I was really writing for, became obvious.
I have since realized and embraced: I’m writing for a past version of myself, for the boy who used to roam the aisles of video stores looking for something strange or exciting, weird and different, for young boys who don’t see themselves in fiction but who probably aren’t looking either. While I write books for everyone, I gear them toward young boys who don’t read. Boys who say they don’t like reading fiction or would rather read an online article or nonfiction—probably because they think this will make them sound smart—or at least not stupid. Of course, these boys aren’t reading shit, much less history or science books. I was like these boys.
We are in a moment now—though aren’t we always?—where masculinity is said to be in crisis. I think there are boys looking for answers on how to grow-up and become men, who want to know what that even means. And we owe these boys better answers, because right now the loudest voices talking to boys are men who absolutely resent and hate women. Men who will turn our boys into insecure, fearful, and hateful adults.
Twitching Heart was never going to find these boys sitting on a shelf in a bookstore or library. Literary fiction for adults can often have a cool indifference to audience, which is why I specifically wrote Barely Missing Everything and now The Broke Hearts for YA audiences. I want to meet readers where they are and not wait to be discovered. Barely Missing Everything and The Broke Hearts will find them in their classrooms and school libraries. I plan to visit schools, talk to students, and place books put directly into their hands.
The boys in my books talk and act like boys, meaning they talk a lot of shit. They say mean things to each other when they’re trying to be close. Make jokes when they’re afraid to be sincere (and also because it’s fun). When they’re afraid, they act tough—instead of brave—and when they’re acting tough they make mistakes, mistakes that have consequences.
My hope is that by reading Barely Missing Everything and The Broke Hearts these boys will have the same experience I had reading The House on Mango Street. That they will not only recognize themselves in books that are as smart and funny as they are but also discover something new and maybe even life changing.
