Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are talking to debut novelists who write about Latine stories. Today, we're speaking with Anika Fajardo about her book, The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore. In her mid-30s, Dolores, who goes by Dorrie, is suddenly alone, due to the death of the woman who raised her, her aunt and her partner.

Dorrie's mother, Maggie, went to Colombia in 1989, where she met Dorrie's father, Juan Carlos. Dorrie doesn't know much about her life. She grew up in Minnesota with her guardians. That is, until she makes good on her dying aunt's wish that she return to Colombia to find out where she came from and a few other things. Dorrie has guides for the trip, her dead ancestors who visit her, and they have a few things to say about how things are going. The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore was named one of the 15 books to read this month by Book Riot. Anika joins us now. Nice to meet you.

Anika Fajardo: Nice to meet you, Alison.

Alison Stewart: It was always your dream to write a novel for adults, but first came a memoir, and then middle-aged readers. Your memoir, Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family, came out in 2019. First of all, how did that memoir come to be?

Anika Fajardo: Well, I was such a beginning writer when I first started that I thought I was telling stories, and it turned out I was actually writing true stories. I discovered the genre of memoir. Little by little, I began to learn how to write a book-length work. Little by little, I discovered I was telling the story of my family and my unusual origins. Nine years later, it was published.

Alison Stewart: Were there similarities, writing a novel as opposed to writing a memoir?

Anika Fajardo: Yes. One of the things that I learned from writing a memoir is just the way that we keep the reader engaged, bring the character arc through the whole book. I really love metaphor and symbolism. I practiced that in my memoir and was able to pull in those same tools. I think of writing a novel basically the same as writing a memoir, except that I've made up all the true things. I've made up the setting, I've made up the people. Then I just tell what happens.

Alison Stewart: Are there similarities between your personal story and the story of Dolores?

Anika Fajardo: Yes. I always write about half Colombian, half Minnesotan characters because that is what I am. It's a very specific demographic. I was born in Colombia, like Dorrie. Although my parents, like hers, were one Minnesotan mother and a Colombian father. Unlike hers, mine lived. They got divorced is what happened. My Minnesota mother brought me back to the United States.

I grew up without any connection to my Colombian background until I was 21, and I went back and visited for the first time and met my father and my father's side of the family for the first time. I'm not an orphan like Dorrie, but I do know what it's like to go back and to seek roots, to try to figure out who you are when a big part of you has been missing your whole life.

Alison Stewart: When did you sit down and start to write your book, The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore?

Anika Fajardo: I started about two and a half years ago. In 2016, my maternal grandmother died, who I was very close to. After she died, I still had this idea of her passing judgment on things in my life. I wasn't making that apple pie, or maybe if I just added a little bit more flour, it would work. I thought about the idea of, "What if we have these?" We have these voices that talk to us, but what if a character actually had voices talking to her, and it just went from there? It's a very flash idea for this character who's got these voices talking to her.

Alison Stewart: As I mentioned, you wrote books for middle-aged readers. What felt different about writing a novel for adults as opposed to middle-agers?

Anika Fajardo: As you said in the beginning, it's always been my dream to write an adult novel because that's primarily what I read. I ended up writing middle-grade novels because I was raising a middle-grade child at the time, and I was reading so many of them. Those voices of the children that I wrote about came very naturally to me.

I really wanted to write the kind of book that I wanted to read and the kind of book that I'm drawn to when I go to a bookstore or a library. Something that has a lot of character development, has a big setting, something that has a little bit of a love story, which is not very satisfying in a middle-grade novel, and just being able to use the vocabulary. You're much more free with vocabulary and with language when writing for adults.

Alison Stewart: We're talking to author Anika Fajardo about her debut novel. It's a woman searching for her identity, traveling from the Midwest to Colombia. It's called The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore. All right. How would you describe our protagonist, Dorrie?

Anika Fajardo: Well, Dorrie is trained as a cartographer. She is currently out of work, but her search for direction is why she became a cartographer. She's fascinated by maps and is always trying to figure out where she's going and her place in the world. She's a little bit cautious and pretty set in her ways. She does not take risks willingly. During the book, she has to figure out how to step out of her comfort zone and go without maps in life.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. As you said, she becomes orphaned in her 30s. How does feeling alone affect her?

Anika Fajardo: She's an only child, so she has had this sense of being alone, and she hasn't known anybody like her. She's grown up with these two moms. One of them is her biological aunt. She's grown up in a community that's primarily white, pretty homogeneous. Even though she's only half Colombian, she's felt a little bit out of place. She's felt a little out of place because she's got the two moms. She's an only child. She spent a lot of time listening to adult conversations as her mothers hosted events and did family things.

She's always felt a little bit alone, but always surrounded by people. After last of her family dies, she really dives deep into being alone, and she isn't totally sure if she wants to not be alone anymore. I think that's really common with people. You almost get used to that feeling of loneliness, and you don't really know how to break out of that.

Alison Stewart: In the book, you write two different timelines. One is Dorrie's story, and one is the story of her mom. How did you come to that decision?

Anika Fajardo: It was sort of a surprise. I was writing a story just in Dorrie's voice, and then all of a sudden, one day, I started wondering a little bit more about her mother and father's story. I wrote about 10 pages just out of the gate, not even thinking. It just kind of poured out of me, and those ended up being lengthened and then scattered throughout the book.

I had just been to Colombia before that and spent Christmas with my dad and his family. I had actually gone to Cali, where the Colombian part takes place, and got to really feel and see Colombia again in a way that I hadn't really done when I'd been there in the past. It just kind of came alive for me, and the idea of really telling this more magical feeling, place, and time in this historical part of place and time in Cali in 1989.

Alison Stewart: In 1989, how would you describe Dorrie's mother?

Anika Fajardo: Dorrie's mother, Margaret or Maggie, is filled with wanderlust since she's been a child. She's the youngest of two girls growing up in the Midwest. All she wants to do is get away. She wants to travel, she wants to see things, and she doesn't really know what she's searching for until she falls in love with Juan Carlos and he brings her back to Colombia. She is just ready and open for everything that happens to her and is really not just in love with Juan Carlos, but she's in love with life and really lives as big as she can, I think, and feels really very deeply and feels this expansive love for the place of Colombia and him and her new life there.

Alison Stewart: On her deathbed, Dorrie's aunt says, "You should go in search of your mom. You should go in search of your heritage. You should go to Colombia." Was this something Dorrie had thought before?

Anika Fajardo: She had not really thought about going to Colombia. She meets a character who turns into the love interest, and he makes a comment about the fact that, "How can you be a cartographer and not have gone anywhere?" She has a passport that she applied for at some point, but she's never actually used it. She's fascinated about place, but she doesn't actually go anywhere. I think her moms try really hard to give her a sense of identity. They talk about Colombia a lot. One of her moms learned Spanish and learns how to cook foods, albeit from Minnesota. She feels like they've paid lip service to her background, and she hasn't really wanted to open that box.

Alison Stewart: You mentioned earlier that Dorrie is a cartographer, meaning she makes or produces maps. How much did you have to learn about cartography to write her character?

Anika Fajardo: I had so much fun writing about a cartographer and writing about maps. I actually have a disclaimer in the back of the book that I am not a cartographer, and I might have mistakes. I did rely on several books, a lot of websites. I had so much fun just learning about the history of mapmaking. There's a lot of coincidence and a lot of really interesting sociological background in mapmaking. I, also, was a research librarian for a long time, and so it was fun to dive back into doing research and reading about all of these various, not just historical, but also some of the ways that maps are made today.

Alison Stewart: In the book, Dorrie has this Greek-like course that weighs in on her life. Like, they aren't voices in her head. Would you describe them for us?

Anika Fajardo: Her voices are all female relatives from her mothers, her great aunt, her grandmas, from various sides. As they die, they become part of her core. When she was about six years old, her grandmother dies, and all of a sudden, she starts hearing her grandmother's voice. These are not voices, these are not wise ancestors that are guiding her in any way; they're more weighing in on her life. They have opinions about everything that she does and everything they think she should be doing. She doesn't really have any control over them. They come and go as if she is a TV show that they're watching. They all hang out and check in, and see how she's doing, and then make comments about her.

Alison Stewart: I'm going to ask you to read a little bit from the book. Would you set this up for us?

Anika Fajardo: Yes. This is the first section when we get a flashback to 1989. It's Cali, Colombia, which is a city in the northern part of Colombia, in a valley where it's very warm. It's a very beautiful city. We get a first glimpse at Dorrie's biological mother, Margaret Moore.

From the moment Margaret Moore stepped foot on Colombian soil, she felt an overwhelming sense of certainty, as if the planets had ordained it. She knew that she would stay, that this would become home. After a year of travel to Japan, to Thailand, to Italy, she hadn't expected to ever be cured of her wanderlust. As she embarked at the Alfonso Bonilla Aragón International Airport in Cali with that usual disoriented feeling of the international travel, the reason she loved travel, really, she felt a prickle of something different. The smells were airport smells: exhaust and cologne and plastic.

The noises were typical of air travel. Garbled announcements, weeping and either joy or despair, and the occasional sharp bark of a drug-sniffing dog. Moving from plane to taxi, from train to hostel, she had been to so many intersections, and all of them, no matter the city or country or even continent, were similar in their common foreignness. Until now, until Colombia. No, she wanted to say aloud, it wasn't the man beside her, or not only that. Although, yes, the fact that Juan Carlos had one hand in hers and the other pressed lightly at the small of her back gave her a frisson of excitement, an otherworldly thrill.

The fact that they were in this together now, traveling halfway around the world to his home country, linked by the gold colored bands they had bought at a kiosk in the Piazza Navona, contributed, she knew, to the sense of familiarity. There was something more. As she stood on the sidewalk outside the arrivals gate and watched Juan Carlos flag a taxi weighed down by suitcases and the ridiculous, antiquated Louis Vuitton makeup case her Aunt Maureen had insisted she bring on her travels, she realized what felt different. This place felt like home.

Although this wasn't her original home, home had been a big ranch in Minneapolis where winters were bitterly cold and summers smotheringly hot. Her childhood had been a place filled with advice from well-meaning relations and aunts and parents. With more than 10 years between her and her sister Jane, Margaret had always been told what to do, what not to do. Jane had indoctrinated her in 1980's counterculture, in individualism and autonomy, in the feminism that she had discovered in college, urging Margaret to choose freedom and independence, and she had.

From the time she was 12 and spent her first week away at Girl Scout camp, Margaret couldn't wait to see the world beyond the Moore household. Even though she had hated the mosquitoes and the smoky campfire and the KP duty, she loved being in a new, unfamiliar place. From then on, she sought opportunities for travel, other summer camps, a high school band trip to Canada, a week in Philadelphia with Aunt Dot. Being away from home allowed her to reinvent herself, to claim her identity, whatever it was at that moment.

Now this Colombian version of Margaret was to live with Juan Carlos in the small Cali apartment he had described to her. "The rest of my family lives in Bogota," he told Maggie that second night in Rome. "You'll come to Cali. It's too cold in Bogota." "Not as cold as Minnesota," she had said, showing him a snapshot she kept in her diary. Mom, Dad, and Janie on the snowy front steps of their Minneapolis rambler. Looking at it, she could still feel her fingers go numb as she pressed the shutter on the new-to-her Nikon.

"We'll never be cold when we're together," he had said. At least she was pretty sure that's what he said, because at that moment, he had embraced her, and his voice was muffled by his strong arms cradling her. On the flight from Rome, he had told her, "There's a mango tree in the courtyard." Dizzy with exhaustion and jet lag and new love, she couldn't even imagine what a mango tree looked like. There had been the palms in Thailand and the pines in Italy. She thought of the sugar maple in her parents' backyard, the one that, according to her older sister, had once held a swing. By the time Maggie was born, though, the branch had long since fallen, as if she herself were a failed extension of the family tree.

Alison Stewart: That was Anika Fajardo, reading from her book, The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore. What did you want people to understand about Colombia?

Anika Fajardo: I really want to show it as a really beautiful place, a place that's really complex, that has this really fascinating history. I want to have this book be an antidote to narcos or things like that. Although the drug wars and violence are a part of Colombia's history, that's not everything that it is, and that it's a beautiful place filled with really beautiful people.

Alison Stewart: What waits for Dorrie in Colombia, without giving too much away?

Anika Fajardo: She really is forced to come out of her shell. Not just the fact that she is traveling in a foreign country and she's never been away from the United States before, but she's also immediately enveloped in this new group of friends. They're both people from the US and people from Colombia, people from all over. This is the first time that she's really found a group of people that are alive, that are supporting her, and really cheering for her.

Alison Stewart: I noticed that you make the dedication of the book to your Grandmother Sally, and you write, "For Sally and for all the madres, mothers, abuelas, and grandmothers out there." First of all, can you describe Sally for us, maybe?

Anika Fajardo: Yes. My Grandmother Sally was-- She had been in World War II. She was part of the waves. She was an extremely energetic person. Loved trying new things, was really active. She ran marathons and did cross-country skiing. She cooked and cleaned. I think she would have had a different life if she had been born in a different time period, where women didn't go straight to getting married and having children. She was really smart, read a huge amount. All my family read aloud to me when I was a kid. She was one of the people that read aloud to me and was just really-- She really embraced life.

Alison Stewart: You used two languages to thank all of the women in your life. Why?

Anika Fajardo: I've got my Minnesota family, both my mother, my maternal family. I also have my in-laws in the US. Then I have my extended family in Colombia, including my father's wife, who's become like a Colombian mother to me. Additionally, my other aunts in Colombia, too. Even though I haven't spent a huge amount of time with them, they're very dear to me.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore. It is by Anika Fajardo. Thank you so much for joining us.

Anika Fajardo: Thank you so much.