This week on KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt talks with Veronica Gonzalez about her debut novel, Twin Time: Or How Death Befell Me. This modern fantasy follows Mona, who was “raised in northeast LA by her widowed immigrant father, a baker, [and grew up] believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnamable doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off on a quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. The journey takes her into the labyrinth of her own fabulations about her parents’ lives, and a dreamy Mexico City that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double, a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children.”

“I found it fascinating because in a certain way, it’s a novel that almost can’t be written,” says Silverblatt. “This is a character who knows nothing factual about her existence. In fact, the reader knows more than she does. Therefore, this book becomes hard to narrate.” Gonzalez explained that she went about by writing the middle of the book first. “But I love the ambiguity of fiction. It was difficult to write, and I had to do a lot of revising to make things make sense.” says Gonzalez. “I’m much more interested in a diffused narrative.”

You can listen to the interview here.