Daniel Miyares is the award-winning author-illustrator of Night Out and Float, and the illustrator of Night Walk to the Sea, written by Deborah Wiles, and That Is My Dream!, a picture book adaptation of Langston Hughes’s “Dream Variation.” Here, Miyares reflects on the family history that inspired his new graphic novel, How to Say Goodbye in Cuban, which follows one boy’s experience during the Cuban Revolution and his journey to the U.S.

Do our names make us who we are? Or do we give meaning to our names? More to the point, to what extent are we the authors of our own stories? I suppose I’ve been asking myself these questions my entire life. I’m not sure I’ve arrived at any real answers, but my new book How to Say Goodbye in Cuban gave me the space to wrestle with them.

Growing up, I knew my middle name was “Armstrong” (my mother’s maiden name) and my last name was “Miyares” (my dad’s surname). I spent quite a lot of time with my mother’s side of the family—every Sunday, to be exact—at my granny’s house, so I felt like I understood what it meant to be an Armstrong. We ate big Sunday dinners complete with fried okra and ham biscuits, sat around in rocking chairs and caught up on the happenings of the past week, and—probably my favorite tradition—we shot off fireworks in the front yard on Christmas Eve. Fireworks and then opening presents, I mean, come on!

But the Miyares side was sort of a mystery to me. I got to see my aunts and cousins every now and again, but rarely. They lived in another state. My mother and father got divorced when I was in the second grade, so my relationship with my father was pretty distant and strained. I knew that he and his brother and sisters came to the U.S. from Cuba when they were just kids, but beyond that, my name was just difficult for people to pronounce. In South Carolina, where I lived, I often had to settle for “Meyers” during school roll call. For better or worse, that was what I knew about my Cuban heritage. My mother made sure that my brother and I had what we needed growing up, but when I stopped to think about it, there were a lot of lingering questions.

Later on, after graduating from art school, I moved to Kansas City, Mo., to begin working for Hallmark Cards. Late one night, I was woken up by the phone—and by phone, I mean a landline that has that annoying twisty cord attached. Half awake, I stumbled through my one-bedroom apartment to answer it. My dad was on the other end of the line. It was strange for my him to be calling me like that. It had been a while since we had spoken, and he didn’t just call out of the blue to check on me. Nevertheless, he was. I think he knew this was a big transition for me. We started with the normal catch-up kind of stuff. He asked if I had a TV. I said I didn’t. He said I should have a TV. It would help if I got lonely and he would wire me the money. I told him I didn’t need one, but he was going to send the money anyway. He told me that he understood how it felt to leave home and go so far away. He joined the army at 17 and was actually stationed in Kansas for a while. That led to him asking if he’d ever told me the whole story of how he came to this country. I said, “No! You never did.”

He proceeded to recount his journey, during the early ’60s just after Castro took control of Cuba. I tried my best to take notes about it all in some steno books that were lying around. I worried that if I didn’t write it all down, the stories would just evaporate—like they never happened. The more he spoke, the more overwhelmed I felt with this sense that I wasn’t just learning something about him; I was learning things about who I was because of his experiences. My name began to come into sharper focus. I was still me and he was still him, but perhaps I understood some of his choices as a father better. Also, I was struck by the decisions that his father, my grandfather (whom I never met), had to make. What must it have been like to live through a revolution and to have to make the choice to put your wife and kids’ lives in danger to flee their homeland for an unknown country? This hit me so much harder a decade later when I was a father myself with two small children. Would I have made the same choices?

I sat on the notes from those conversations for almost 20 years. At first, I was content to just have it all on paper and safely tucked away; but as time went on, I felt compelled to retell the stories in some way. I suspected that in the retelling, I might just gain a deeper understanding of my dad and his side of the family. What I didn’t see coming in the process were all the ways I would understand myself better. My dad died unexpectedly while I was working on the book. So, I’ll never be able to separate its making from my grieving of his passing, but that’s okay, I think, because our conversations will live on. They don’t just have to be relegated to a dusty drawer in my studio. They can be out in the world, hopefully starting new conversations with young readers. I think my dad would have liked that.

How to Say Goodbye in Cuban by Daniel Miyares. Random House/Schwartz, $21.99 Sept. 30 ISBN ​​978-0-593-56829-3; $13.99 paper ISBN 978-0-593-56830-9