Author Interview – Family We Haven’t Met
Q: What made you write Family We Haven’t Met?
A: My sister is becoming more fragile in health and one day I realized that if she died before I did, that there would be no one left in my immediate world who knows me as a Puerto Rican. No one would know how to sing ‘Feliz, feliz en tu dia’ (a birthday song) with me. No one could drop Spanish into the flow of a conversation. No one would have the same cultural reference points that we have from having grown up together on the island. In effect, if she pre-deceased me, culturally, she would take half of me with her.
That started me thinking about cultural estrangement—about how those of us who emigrate from where we started make all these tradeoffs to be able to ‘get on with’ life in our new countries. At the same time, we come as a result of very specific conditions. My own family, for example, came to Canada from Puerto Rico in the 1970s because the war in Vietnam was raging and my brother was draft age.
Emigrants / immigrants not only leave all our cultural touch points behind, we also subsume important aspects of who we are in order to integrate into our new culture. I wanted to explore that dynamic of leaving / staying behind in Family We Haven’t Met.
Q: How did you research the book?
A: I spent seven weeks in Puerto Rico in 2024-25, staying with my cousins, and travelling around the main island, as well as the off-island of Vieques, where the story is also set. (Puerto Rico is an archipelago of islands.)
I drew deeply on my own experience of returning to that world after a long time away, using my feelings and even the smallest of encounters as “living” research. Every little thing mattered during that visit, from phrases I heard spoken in a grocery store, to the scent of the air, to the conversations that I had with people my cousins introduced me to. I owe my cousins a huge debt of gratitude for their having opened doors to me that, even as a Spanish-speaker, would not have been open to me as a tourist.
Nothing was wasted during that trip—everything I learned counted, and much of it ended up in Family We Haven’t Met as bits of background colour.
Q: In Family We Haven’t Met, Jo Cooper emigrated, and Adelia García Morales stayed behind. What are their relative experiences of diaspora?
A: As I wrote the book, I realized that the people who stay behind experience separation, too, in very real ways, especially when their own families leave. This is particularly significant in a culture where family is everything.
Puerto Rico has a long history of mass migrations to the United States (Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens). They often left for economic reasons, but also due to the devastating effects of hurricanes, After Hurricane Maria, for example, over 200,000 people fled the island in its aftermath. At this point in history, some 6 million Puerto Ricans live abroad, and only 3 million on the island itself. So who’s the diaspora? The majority? Or the minority?
Q: What other aspects of identity did you explore in Family We Haven’t Met?
A: Family We Haven’t Met is a rich book and works on several levels at once. One of the recurring themes that I explore in all of my books is ‘identity.’
In this novel, one of the main characters, Jo Cooper, is also a butch lesbian who daily faces reactions from people who expect her to look and behave a certain way because she is female. Her visible gender non-conformity is not only stressful in gendered spaces, it can be life-threatening.
Adelia, on the other hand, is femme, and feels invisible as a lesbian.
There are also explorations of how things that happen to us change who we perceive ourselves to be (for example, as a victim, or as unworthy). There are public as well as private aspects to identity. It is layered.
Q: What role does history play in the novel?
A: Although I don’t consider this book to be ‘historical,’ history features prominently in it. The women take a tour around the island and through that we discover how colonial power and the struggle for self-definition have shaped what Puerto Rico is today. This struggle for self-definition is reflected in the characters themselves.
Q: What role does family play in this novel?
A: Family is central to Puerto Rican culture. Everything revolves around it. When the story opens, Jo has just lost her mother—her last living relative. As a result she is adrift.
Adelia’s family—except for her wise Titi Iris—have fled the island, leaving her behind. Her own effort to create a family (her marriage) was a disaster and source of humiliation for her. So, she too, is adrift.
One of the aspects of this novel that I love the best is how family is re-collected, found, and re-built into a vital new unit.
Q: Where did you get the title from?
A: It comes from the book, both as a reflection of the sub-plot and as a reflection of Puerto Rican culture itself. Puerto Ricans are highly gregarious people who essentially treat strangers as family they just haven’t met yet.