Marie Arana glides across the lobby of the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C. She is so smartly turned out in a business suit that you might imagine she has just finished another day working the reins of contemporary literature down the street at the Washington Post, where she edits Book World, one of the country's leading book review sections. In fact, she admits, she has been sitting nervously in her office not talking about her new memoir, just out from The Dial Press, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood (Forecasts, Apr. 2). This story of a bicultural childhood, which has won starred pre-pub reviews from Kirkus and Booklist as well as PW, will not, as she has already made clear to her staff, be reviewed in Book World. Yet one suspects that the memoir will be widely read by her Post colleagues, one of whom has already remarked, Arana says, that his girlfriend also calls her father "papi."
PW noted that Arana "writes beautifully" in recalling her upbringing in America and Peru, third child of an American woman with a "Hollywood face" and a brooding MIT-educated Peruvian father. Their turbulent upper-class marriage straddled two cultures and two hemispheres, and whether living in Peru or the United States, Arana was always "the other." "I was a mongrel," she writes.
As a child in Peru, she learned that people wished her American mother would "go back where she came from." On a train trip to visit her mother's American relatives in Wyoming, a fellow passenger looked at her and said, "Well, I'll be. She's a little foreigner." In Summit, N.J., where Marie's family moved when she was 10, and where they were the only Hispanic family, a black girl told her, "You oughta go back where you belong."
Never bitter, Arana looks back with compassion and humor, recalling, for example, one Halloween in Summit when she got even with a taunting girl named Kelly O'Neill. Taking a Peruvian blow-dart from the wall at home, she smeared green paint on her cheeks, put feathers in her hair and shot a wet spitball across the classroom at the back of Kelly's head.
As PW's reviewer noted, Arana's focus in American Chica is on "the way cultures define, limit and enrich us," and her motivation for writing the book becomes apparent quickly during our conversation. At 50, Arana is a sophisticated and attractive woman who is fluent in a half-dozen languages and holds degrees in Russian, Mandarin studies and linguistics from Northwestern, Yale and the University of Hong Kong, respectively. She worked for nine years as a senior editor at Harcourt Brace and four years as vice-president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster. Then, in 1992, tired of commuting from D.C. to S&S in New York, she took a job as deputy book editor at the Washington Post.
"My first day on the job, the head of recruitment stopped when she saw on my forms that I was born in Lima. 'Oh, are you a minority hire?' she asked me, wondering how to put me down. 'Well, I guess you could say so,' I told her."
Arana continues: "I had never thought of myself as part of a minority group. Maybe as a minority of one. Suddenly, I was being asked to do things like serve on Post diversity committees and get more Hispanic coverage into the paper. It struck me that I was part of this growing group of Americans. This was a novelty to me."
Not long after, at a panel session she was moderating for the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Arana asked Rudolfo Anaya, Cristina Garcia and other Latino/a authors to talk about the relationship of their ethnic identities to their work. "I said that for me, Latina identity was difficult to pin down. When I was in either place, Peru or the U.S., I felt one parent was a blip. My own experience was of blipping in and out; of belonging and not belonging."
One panelist, the poet Judith Ortiz Cofer, was struck by Marie's remarks. "I was intrigued and charmed by both the story and her obvious talent as a storyteller," Cofer recalls. "After our program, we talked and I encouraged her to write a memoir. I am so pleased that she actually did it."
Now, five years later, Arana says writing the memoir was transformational. "I had done a good job of burying the child I was. As I wrote, I found there was something very rigid and false about the armor I had built around myself. I was always the professional businesswoman who was a certain way—who would never want to have anything but a perfect life revealed." Rephrasing it, she explains, "What always mattered to me was being a good girl with a perfect life and nice little career."
The book, she says, was written during the breakup of a marriage. Indeed, it "ended" the marriage. "Now, what really mattered was the emotional truth of who I was," she says. "I had been a rigid, judgmental person. Writing this book made me feel all of that was so foolish. My marriage was not perfect. And I was in love with my closest friend, Jonathan Yardley."
Yardley, the Post's Pulitzer Prize—winning book critic, read each chapter of American Chica as it was written. "As I was finishing the book, I think he realized he loved me," says Arana. "One day he arrived at my doorstep, came in, sat down and said, 'You know, I've been very lucky, with a wonderful career, marvelous children and a happy life. But I don't have the one thing I want more than anything in the world.' "
"What?" asked Arana.
"The one thing I want most is you," he replied.
They were married last year.
Arana hesitates to tell the story—she is not sure Jon would want her to—but "the story is true, and I will. Had I been the person I was before I wrote the book, I would have said, 'That's nice, I'm flattered.' But in this open emotional state, I couldn't deny that I was very much in love with him."
Actually, American Chica is not the book Arana set out to write. In 1996, she spent a month at Stanford University on a media fellowship and found herself with free time after completing her project. She decided to look into the story of Julio Cesar Arana, a rubber baron who built an empire in the Putumayo border region of Peru and Colombia in the early 1900s. Julio Arana made his fortune by enslaving and brutalizing thousands of indigenous people; he became the subject of an international scandal when exposed by the Irish patriot Roger Casement. Although her father and other family members always denied it ("He has nothing to do with you"), Arana grew up with the suspicion that she was related to the "Devil of the Putumayo."
In Stanford's stacks, Arana read investigator Casement's reports to the British Parliament and "saw the name Arana everywhere in this extraordinary story. I became intrigued by the notion that this man might be a relative of mine. This prompted me to think about my childhood and a life shuttling between two worlds."
When her agent, Amanda Urban, became enthusiastic about a few sample pages of the book, Arana took eight months off from the Post to write the rest. Her research included a visit to the former jungle empire of Julio Arana. "All traces of Arana were wiped out," she says. "On what had been Calle Arana, street signs had been painted over. I could sometimes see the word Arana showing through." Julio's mansion, with its huge balconies overlooking the Amazon, had been turned into a school. A watchman gave her a tour.
"Who lived here?" Arana asked the watchman. "A terrible man," he replied. "A very terrible man."
At one point, she met with a Peruvian historian, who said, "I should have known. You have his face," when she explained the purpose of her visit. "It staggered me," she recalls. For years, she had "willfully" denied ties to this "family shame."
Arana's first draft ended with her discovery of Julio in the family's past, she says. "But I realized that what I really wanted to tell was not the story of my ancestors so much as the story of my parents. They were so deeply in love, despite the cultural conflicts." She took another two months off to rewrite the book completely.
From her childhood days "rooted to the Andean dust" of a hacienda in Cartavio, Peru, where her father was a W.R. Grace engineer, to the family's move to America when Arana was 10, she traces the lives of her parents and extended family. The latter includes her father's father, a noted engineering professor who stayed upstairs, in the study of his home, "for 40 years"; a great-grandfather who was governor of Cuzco, Peru; and her mother's relatives in the American West.
Her parents met in the 1940s while her father was studying at MIT. Her mother, Marie, was a blonde violinist; her father, Jorge, a dark-haired Peruvian. Their clashes occurred across broad cultural chasms. The author found herself alternating the roles of Latina and gringa at appropriate junctures. Finally she realized, as she writes, that she could "Make it up, fashion a whole new person."
Arana's parents are in their 80s now and living in suburban Maryland. "There isn't a day that goes by that he doesn't tell her that she's beautiful, or a day when they don't bicker," says the author. Both have read her book.
"My father would not speak to me for two months," she says. He was upset with her for revealing that her mother had had three previous marriages—something the couple has never discussed to this day, she says. "He used a hot-pink magic marker and wrote, "Not True," and "Lies" all over the book. "He refused to see me. My mother said the book was fine. Then, after two months, my mother called and said, 'Your father will see you now.' " Says Arana: "I went running to their home. When I came into the house I could see my father down the hall seated at a table. He threw up his arms and said, 'We are not going to talk about the book. You are my daughter. Fine!' "
She adds: "Within a few months he was quoting from the book at family gatherings!"
Arana has always wanted to write, but the path has been circuitous. After teaching linguistics in Hong Kong (brought there by an early marriage), she returned to the States as an editor at Harcourt Brace and S&S, working mainly with nonfiction authors such as Eugene McCarthy and Pat Moynihan but also with novelists such as Stanley Elkin and Manuel Puig. Her happy experience with her first book of nonfiction has led her to begin a first novel, set in the Amazon jungle.
Arana is optimistic about the future of book publishing. "When you are working in a trade house, you see just a tiny corner of publishing. At Book World, 150 to 200 books cross my desk each day. We see maybe 20,000 of the 50,000 books published each year, and we review 1,500. We're forced to look at a great river of books—and it's a heartening spectacle. You cannot fail to be optimistic. So much of the industry's output is so good."
She remains frustrated over Book World's lack of space for reviews—just 16 pages for the stand-alone section each week. "We get so little advertising—it's a real annoyance," she says. "It seems shortsighted of publishers not to be more supportive of the Boston Globe, the L.A. Times and the Post. They don't appreciate that some newspaper reviews and review sections—not the Post, which has a real commitment—will fold or cut back without support. That would make my heart sink if I were a publisher."
As for her marriage to Jonathan Yardley, she notes that he now reports to the head of the Post 's Style section rather than to the editor of Book World (a potential conflict that raised eyebrows at the time of their marriage). She smiles when asked whether the couple joke about the fact that she has written a memoir. In 1997, while she was working on the book, Yardley wrote a zinger of a column on Joyce Maynard's memoir, At Home in the World, in which he called this "an age of confessional memoir gone berserk."
Says Arana: "When that column appeared, my editor, Susan Kamil, called and said, 'Please tell Jonathan to be quiet.' Of course there was nothing to be done. Besides, he encouraged me every step of the way."
