Interview With Young Adult Novelist Sofia Quintero

I have come to realize and embrace that my voice as a writer is strongest in the first person. It doesn’t mean that I have not or will not ever again write in any other voice, but with this story, I did want to play to my strengths since I knew there would be other things to challenge me. One that I welcomed was the challenge of writing in the voice and from the perspective of a teenage boy since obviously that has never been my experience. In a way, writing the story in Efrain’s voice helped me to maintain the compassion that’s necessary to keep judgments and didacticism at bay. Finally, Efrain’s Secret might be my first novel with a male protagonist, but I still think of it as every bit feminist as any of my previous work. In that regard, I wanted this novel, in part, to be one exploration of how patriarchal constructions of masculinity wound boys – especially boys who are already vulnerable because of racism and classicism – and it just intuitively felt right to let Efrain tell his own story. Something told me that even when he’s conflicted, unaware, misinformed or otherwise unable to articulate precisely what Efrain thinks or feels at a given moment, the first person would provide more space for the reader to understand him. More so than in third person which sounds counterintuitive even to me. I can’t explain fully why I made this call, but I think it was a good one.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that for a young person to have high expectations of themselves, others in their life must have the same expectations. Who do you think in the book was the most influential in encouraging Efrain to pursue higher education? To seek to attend Ivy League institutions?

In my mind, Efrain has always been surrounded by people who value a good education. The most influential of these is his mother Dolores who herself never finished college, and that is revealed early in the story. While not explicit in the book, Chingy’s parents are college graduates, and it was a given that their sons would go to college. In fact, Chingy’s older brother Baraka who is attending Morehouse is a model for Efrain as well as his own brother. Even Rubio who Efrain suspects discouraged Dolores from finishing her college education initially put his own children through private school for a period of time. I remember in the 90s when there was a major political battle in New York City over public education, and one member of the board of education made a very racist, classist, xenophobic comment to the effect that working-class children of color in immigrant families were failing because their parents did not care about their education. This was years before Herman Badillo lost his liberal mind and spewed that same nonsense in his book. My own parents never finished high school, but that is precisely why they pushed my siblings and I to go to college. So I hope it comes across that a parent’s own educational level or financial ability is no indicator of whether or not s/he wants values a good education. And I also wanted to show that even at an academically challenged high school, there exist teachers like Mr. Sweren and Señorita Polanco who have high expectations for their best students and give them their all as educators because I myself had teachers like that. As for the Ivy League aspirations, I have been asked how did the Ivy League land on my own radar as young student. I really cannot tell you definitively, but that still goes to show you that the power that these schools have to influence their graduates’ life outcomes is known to even those who are the least likely to attend them. I have talked to urban, working-class children of color and they know what Harvard is and how it can effect your life to attend it. Mind you, they may have never heard of Phillip Exeter or Andover. But they at least know Harvard, Princeton and Yale.

The book had me in tears at times, reading some of the statements, thoughts, dialogue of the characters (my first emotional reaction was on page 6 when Efrain and his mother are filling out financial aid forms and Efrain thinks: “See how she says we? My moms believes in me, all day, every day.” Were there emotional parts of the book for you to write? Moments in the story that were emotional to create?

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