When Xochitl Gonzalez turned 40, she\u2019d already made it. <\/p>\n
She was a Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn who\u2019d gone to Brown University and she\u2019d had multiple successes as an entrepreneur in New York City, working for the Clio Awards, running small businesses and a marketing consulting firm.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Then she reinvented herself as a writer \u2013 and made it on a whole different level. Her debut novel, \u201cOlga Dies Dreaming,\u201d was a bestseller in 2022, and her \u201cBrooklyn Everywhere\u201d column for The Atlantic was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary the following year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gonzalez\u2019s new novel, \u201cLast Night in Brooklyn,\u201d is narrated by a Puerto Rican Brooklynite named Alicia, who looks back at the heady days of 2007 when she was still in her 20s and working in advertising.<\/p>\n
SEE ALSO:\u00a0Like books? Get our free Book Pages newsletter about bestsellers, authors and more<\/a><\/p>\n Alicia gets caught up in the swirl of La Garza, a local fashionist designer who has become an enigmatic icon, the Jay Gatsby of the Fort Greene neighborhood, which was about to be changed forever; its residents and businesses are being forced out for a new arena, an ugly mall and luxury apartments.\u00a0<\/p>\n The book is framed by the final night of Freddy\u2019s, a bar that had been in the neighborhood for decades.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gonzalez, who lived in Fort Greene for 20 years, spoke recently by video about those days and how her world fits into the book and vice versa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Q. I was reading your book on the subway last night, and a woman told me how much she loves your books.\u00a0<\/p>\n Oh my God, that is the best compliment. When I started writing, I really wanted to be good enough to bother schlepping on the subway.<\/p>\n Q. Who do you picture as your reader?<\/p>\n I grew up in Brooklyn and my family\u2019s Puerto Rican, but I went to Brown for college, and was working in this professional environment that nobody in my family understood. <\/p>\n I\u2019d met a lot of people like me at school. But I never saw them in books. When I started to write my first novel, I pictured someone Latina. But then I started thinking about anybody that went from one world into another, particularly with that socioeconomic class thing \u2013 growing up in a family that has one set of values and then living in this other world.\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s always that split in a sense of self, and there are different points of reconciliation. That\u2019s who I\u2019m always writing to.\u00a0<\/p>\n SEE ALSO:\u00a0Where\u2019s the nearest bookstore? See our map of 90+ SoCal bookshops<\/a><\/p>\n In the book, La Garza has the audacity to be really creative and then to take this leap on the business side. But it\u2019s so rough. As talented as La Garza is, there are areas where she\u2019s out of her depth because they\u2019re operating in a different language, and she doesn\u2019t even know enough to know they\u2019re operating in a different language.\u00a0<\/p>\n My businesses survived the recession, and we\u2019d be getting profiled in bridal magazines, but we were living on a line of credit because all my clients had been at Bear Stearns but lost their jobs. It was a lot of stress. It was so important to me that at some point La Garza\u2019s credit card got declined. But I didn\u2019t make it a major scene; it\u2019s just the fact that she\u2019s a mere mortal like the rest of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n Q. One big difference between you and Alicia is that you grew up in a politically oriented family. How much does that inform your fiction?\u00a0<\/p>\n Way more than I would like to tell my mother that it does. My mom is like a full-on socialist; she said, \u201cI hope you didn\u2019t vote for Mamdani, that pseudo-socialist, he\u2019s a bourgeois in disguise.\u201d She ran for vice president of the United States for the Socialist Workers\u2019 Party in 1984. She was often out on the road, which is why I lived with her parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n My grandparents were good union members, Democrats who would go to rallies and get out the vote. They weren\u2019t political like my mom, but labor was always on our minds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Maybe it was a bit of a rebellion, but I\u2019ve always really liked nice things. I always loved going with my aunt to Bergdorf Goodman, and then I did luxury event planning, which my family thought was the weirdest thing in the world. So I know a lot of people who also have money and they don\u2019t have horns under their hair. But that doesn\u2019t mean working people aren\u2019t getting screwed. So I try taking a pragmatic approach to how characters see life.<\/p>\n