It is a privilege as a reader to have a favourite writer. An author whose books are unfailingly captivating and brilliant, that stay with you for long after you have read the final page. Mariana Enríquez is the writer whose works I read without hesitation. My breath hitches in my throat when I see her new releases in a bookstore. She is the author of short-story collections Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, as well as her major novel Our Share of Night. In 2024, she published A Sunny Place for Shady People to critical acclaim. Her writing is deeply rooted in modern Argentina. It delves into the macabre, the sinister, and the supernatural, and often concerns modern politics and collective memory. It was an honour to speak to Mariana on the 17th of April in the lead up to her talks at Sydney Writers Festival.
Emilie: Was there a particular moment in your life when you knew you wanted to pursue writing professionally?
Mariana: That’s a tricky one because I started publishing before I really thought of [myself] as a writer or considered writing as a career. My first novel I wrote when I was 17, in high school. Then, that got published when I was 20, by a series of events. I didn’t know anybody who was a writer. I didn’t know anybody in publishing. The sister of a friend of mine was a journalist, and she started working at this big publishing house. She had written the biography of the president. It was a hit because the president was insane. She knew that the publishers were looking for a novel by someone young. She knew I had written a novel. She took it to an editor, the editor liked it, and they published it. It was rushed. It was fun, but I wasn’t thinking of a writing career.
It was useful for me because I started working in journalism very fast [after studying]. I was studying journalism, and I was torn between proceeding with [journalism], though I loved literature. I wasn’t sure, so it took me a while. I published another novel in 2004, and at that time, I was almost 30. It was like: yeah, this is what I want to do. I very quickly also changed my style and started writing horror. It was a slow development. Now, I don’t even understand. I see my [first] novel, and I don’t know if I like it. I haven’t read it in ages. I remember that I wanted to write about my generation and rock ‘n’ roll. I was pretty punk rock. I’m working on a novel now, and the amount of work… I remember myself at 17. I was a very wild child. I think: when did this happen?
E: Where do you draw your inspiration from? How much of it is imagination, and how much of it is derived from reality or experiences?
M: It’s mostly imagination. Many of the things are taken from real events, but not necessarily real events from my life. I sometimes think of the things people tell me, the things I read somewhere. News. I am a collector of news. Of course, people you know. They’re twisted enough not to be about anyone in particular. When I do write about myself and my experience, I just do it. There is a lot of non-fiction work I have that is going to be translated. In journalism, I do a lot of first-person things, but in literature, I really prefer to go to another world.
E: It’s interesting that you say that. You have talked before about how your stories feature supernatural elements, but fear comes more often from police, neighbourhoods, poverty, violence, and men. Why do you choose to bring in the supernatural to work alongside these real, terrifying elements?
M: Every writer has a voice, not just [a] style. It’s what things make the experience of writing your own. The things you enjoy yourself, and have something to say about. I choose to write about violence, fear, and trauma. But I’m not interested in writing about those issues in a realistic way. The main reason is that I enjoy horror literature. I enjoy fantastic literature, the gothic. I think it has amazing metaphors that, for me, work better than realistic features for some things. I’m going to use a very obvious example. The figure of the ghost works better to talk about trauma and something that keeps coming back, and something you can’t get rid of. Something that makes your house not feel like your house. I find a better vehicle to talk about the things I care about [in horror] than just in a realistic fashion. In a realistic fashion, to me, it’s a bit dry. Not for everybody, but for me, when I write it, it’s like — okay and? But, when I add the supernatural, the fantastic or the gore or the satire, it really honours the literature I enjoy. It makes the whole procedure something I enjoy, and the writing something fun.
I am a journalist too, so I know how to document stuff. In literature, I don’t want to document stuff. I want to think about it. I’m not addressing the issue itself, but working around it. Then, you end up with this ghost story. A lot of very talented writers can do it with realistic fiction, but I’m not that good with that. But maybe it’s also just not what I like.
E: I think your ability to bring the supernatural out of everyday, particularly urban, settings is truly something distinctive to your work, as is the concept of place. Has your relationship with Buenos Aires, and Argentina more broadly, shaped the way you choose to write horror?
M: Yes. Buenos Aires especially as a place that is an urban metropolis of South America. It’s an ultra-intense experience, but once you get out of the city, Argentina is a bit like Australia. It’s a very big country with not many people. There are a lot of empty spaces. After you get out of the 15-million people, ultra-metropolis, there’s The Pampas, and then there is nothing. That contrast that you experience there is something that really shaped what I do. Both places have, for me, different kinds of mythologies, different kinds of vibes. The fact that they’re so near each other is interesting. Mostly, I write about the city. What I write is very Argentinian, but it’s also the experience of a big city, of middle-class women and urban poverty. Something we all know, even in richer countries. There are characters in my stories that live on the streets, for example. They could be set in New York or LA. In fact, they are sometimes. I was in LA, I thought: “There are more homeless people here than in Buenos Aires. This is amazing”. Amazing, not in a good way. It’s very surprising, for us. In South America, you think rich countries are perfect, and then you realise it’s not like that. Even at my age. I really like to haunt.
To me, the gothic genre had to do with ruins. Those ruins were, especially in [works] written by women like Ann Radcliffe and Mary Shelley, of places that represented power or power that was [dwindling]. Cathedrals, churches, monasteries. The fading power of the church, and the soon-to-be fading power of the monarchy. Castles. But, the power was still there. I think in cities you can really see the decline, or this late-stage capitalism. The abandoned inner-city, the CBD. It’s crazy. Or the empty parking lots, the supermarkets that people don’t visit. People buy everything online [now], especially after the pandemic. Those places are like empty temples, they are our castles. They’re ugly institutions. We made very ugly ruins, but they are our ruins. I like to haunt those places. That’s why the genre works for me. I don’t want to do this as a realistic post-industrial city [setting], but more as you would think of an empty castle.
E: In the same vein, do you think your relationship with Argentina has changed as you’ve become a writer?
M: Yes, but at the same time, no. Argentina is not Buenos Aires, and I’m very much a writer who is from the city. The country is not [the same] as the rest of it. Though, what Argentina has that is always the same — It’s a bit of a loop, a phantasmagoric loop — is that we are always in crisis. My relationship has changed from it being very traumatic, when I was little with the dictatorship, and then trying to get used to the insanity and being hyper-alert. You find ways of doing things. In the later years, I was very weary of it and very tired of this never-ending [loop]. There’s something I’m really grateful for in Argentinian culture, and it’s the permanent curiosity of the people and the literature. It’s very interesting to be a writer in a country where the main literature, the canon, is Borges and Cortázar. It’s fantastic literature. Even today, the writers, such as Samantha Schweblin, work in the fantastic and supernatural.
For some reason, magical realism was a very particular thing that happened in a certain time, in certain countries, written mostly by men. Since the 60s, it was sort of abandoned as a style, and it changed a lot. In Argentina, the way we treat the fantastic genre is more short-stories and less marvellous. It’s more Kafkian. That tradition, to me, is a gift as a writer. You go to school and they give you the short stories of these [writers], when you’re eight or nine, and you’re reading fantastic things. It’s not literature meant for children. Very early, you have this [tradition]. I always really liked it. It has to do with migration, being a country that is very mixed. It gives you a certain openness. Argentina is a country that can be very difficult, but it’s very interesting too.
E: You spoke about magical realism, and it’s an interesting point, but when I go into a bookstore, there seems to be a large boom in Latin American authors writing horror. In particular, women are writing horror. Why do you think there has been this regional turn towards the genre?
M: In Magical Realism, the explosion of imagination was fantastic. But, that South America, of the 50s and the 60s, was a South America that was full of hope and the idea of a new continent that was going to have its own history. It has a lot to do with the Cuban Revolution. Now we know what happened. At that moment in the 50s, the generation of my parents was saying no to the neocolonialism of the United States and trying our own stuff. That imploded for many reasons. One of the reasons was a disastrous revolution. Another reason was that the US decided to stop the spread of socialism on the continent, which caused the dictatorships. They were involved in every coup, especially in Chile, which had a democratic-socialist government. So, that was the era of magical realism. It was coincidental with the revolution, the idea of a new continent. It’s full of optimism. If you read One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is so vivid. There’s such force there. Then came the dictatorships in the 70s. They were all over the continent, including Brazil. When we got out of that, the literature that emerged was very dark. It was very hopeless. It was literature born of loss. A loss of people, an idea. Argentina was not rich, but it was doing pretty well in the 60s. In the latest decade, especially in Colombia and Mexico, the ultra-violence of the Narco Wars. It’s very pessimistic. The genre that was born of that state of mind was horror.
I speak for myself, but I think this happened to more or less all of us, especially the women. We were trying to make sense of what was going on, and it really felt like horror. It was scary. Also, something that is very important is that our pop culture from the 80s and 90s was slasher movies and Stephen King, as everyone else in the world. It was that mix: a totally fucked up reality with a pop-culture that was [fun] narratives of the imagination and horror. When I talk to my friends, like María Fernanda Ampuero, who is from Ecuador, it’s a very different culture. She had the same thing, but more religion than me. That mixture of a country that is very complicated, while watching The Exorcist on TV. In her case, going to mass and the whole aesthetic of catholicism made an aesthetic explosion which then became horror, or gothic, or weird. I read magical realism, and to me, it’s wonderful, but it’s too happy.
E: On that same topic of women, you write a lot about young women in your narratives. Why do you often choose horror to talk about women’s struggles?
M: There is many things in the female experience, and even in the Queer experience, that put you in the place of the other, which is the basic notion of horror. It could be the monster, it could be the one that is not the norm, the one that is vulnerable. Most of the time, we side with the monster. If you read Dracula these days, in general, you side with the vampire or the other. I don’t think it’s the victim, but the other. The one that is not conforming to the norm. Of course, in the last 20 years, especially in South America, women [choosing] not to conform to the norm was very violent. We didn’t have the same second-wave feminism as in the US because we were under dictatorship. We couldn’t do it. It was a bit of an explosion.
The other explanation is to me more mysterious: the same reason women like true crime so much. You can say whatever about it, try to understand the violence. But, really, I have no idea why we as women enjoy [true crime] so much. I don’t particularly like it because I get bored, not because I get [scared]. I’m not horrified at all and it’s kind of strange. Not only women can really enjoy a true crime series that is absolutely graphic and horrendous, but many online in the true crime, podcasts, blogging [space] are women. Obsessed — it’s all women. Leave us alone and we do the substance. I’m not just speaking about men but what is allowed in certain industries. For instance, in Hollywood there were not that many women directors or screenwriters, and then you let one loose and this is what she produces. Maybe the norm was that we were all freaks, but no one knew because we didn’t have expression. They thought we were going to talk about kids, but no. We want to talk about serial killers.
E: I’m a major fan of your work. Ever since I read your first book to be published in English, I’ve become hooked on your writing. I can’t wait to get my hands on anything you write. Can you tell us about your upcoming books and projects?
M: Thank you. Later this year, I have a book being released in English. As I said in the beginning, I write memoirs. It’s a travel log on cemeteries all over the world. I mix the stories of the cemeteries: anthropological things, architectural, trivia, everything with my own experience. Instead of me, Mariana, travelling to a country or place, it’s travelling to a cemetery. From the US, Australia, Europe, South America — all over the place. It’s different situations in my life. So, that is coming in September or October. It’s around Halloween. It’s not scary, it’s a non-fiction book about cemeteries in the first-person about my relationship with death that is very mediated by the fact that I come from a country where, when I was little, the dictatorship killed a lot of people and these people were disappeared. We didn’t have bodies. The military junta kidnapped them and threw the bodies in the water. We don’t have a place to bury the people. There are thousands of people who are dead, and not there, and don’t have a grave. My obsession with cemeteries was not this old goth thing, but also had this deep relationship to the fact that, to me, a grave is not scary. It’s a place where things should be. You should have a place where you can put someone, and their name, and can leave flowers or insult them. They can’t be thrown somewhere as it was in the dictatorship or now in Mexico or Colombia. They are also doing graphic novels of [my] short stories that are already published.
E: What advice can you give students who dream of pursuing writing or journalism?
M: Well, journalism excites me more. Written journalism is in such a crisis now, because of many things. Mostly because owners of media tell you that you can’t do [long-form] writing because people don’t have the attention span. But, I really think that written journalism will come back. They tell you that it’s gone [over and over], there are lots of people who think: Why? Are we idiots [who] can’t read something long? You can really write a very good article with artificial intelligence, but there is a point where what someone can tell you in an interaction is irreplaceable. For many reasons. The robot can be weird, but people? They are 10 times more weird and complicated. I’m having a hopeful day today. I’ve been reading pieces of very good non-fiction. For the people who want to pursue journalism: talk to people, go to places, feel the places. Don’t do articles only with data. Data is easy now — it’s the easiest thing. Talking to people is something that somehow we have to relearn. The whole thing that made journalism interesting in the first place was being near people.
For writers: patience. It takes a lot of time. It’s difficult. You have to navigate what is trendy, what the publishers want. There are a lot of places [where] you can publish your things now: Patreon, Substack. I always find that the writers who approach me want the physical book. I understand, it has a different feel. People covet that object. But, at the same time, I really like these new opportunities of getting your stuff known out there. If I were younger, I would use all the possibilities to get my writing out here. If you still covet the book, well… it will come. There are people who are paying attention, but you have to be patient.
And read. The people who don’t read make me crazy. It’s like a musician who doesn’t listen to music. Read. Read what you like. I read horror when I’m bored. Read.
Mariana will be speaking at Sydney Writers’ Festival on Wednesday, 21st May and Saturday, 24th May.
