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Episode 109—Jean Guerrero Tries to Solve the Mystery of Her Father
129 Plays7 years ago
"I could leave my father as a mystery, because he was the mystery I was trying to solve," says Jean Guerrero. Today I’m joined by a special guest. You may have heard of her, maybe not, but nevertheless her name is Jean Guerrero. She is a television reporter for KPBS in San Diego covering immigration. Too bad that’s not a topical subject. She is the winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize and has worked for the Wall Street Journal and has won several reporting awards. Most recently she is the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir, a story about discovering her father by crossing borders both physical and spiritual. This is the show where I speak to the world’s best artists about telling true stories, how those stories are told, and why it matters to them. I’m your host Brendan O’Meara and this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast! Hey, did you enjoy the show? Be sure to tweet us some love, I’m @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod and Jean is @jeanguerre. If you have a moment and you made it this far, please consider leaving an honest review on Apple Podcasts and if you want more goodies, head over to brendanomeara.com to sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter. Once a month. No Spam. Can’t beat it. The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by Hippocamp 2018. Now in its fourth year, Hippocamp is a three-day Pennsylvania writing conference that features 50+ speakers, engaging sessions in four tracks, interactive all-conference panels, author and attendee readings, social activities, networking opps, and optional, intimate pre-conference workshops. The conference takes place in lovely Lancaster, from Aug. 24 through the 26th. Past keynotes have been Lee Gutkind, Mary Karr, Dinty W. Moore, and Jane Friedman (all have been past guests on the podcast. Whaaaat?) This year Abigail Thomas will be the featured speaker. Visit hippocampusmagazine.com and click the “Conference” tab in the toolbar and if you enter the keyword CNFPOD at checkout you will receive a $50 discount. This offer is only good until Aug. 10 or until all those tickets are sold. There are a limited number so act now! Like RIGHT NOW. Hippocamp 2018: Create. Share. Live.
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Transcript
Introduction to HippoCamp 2018
00:00:00
Speaker
The Creative Nonfiction Podcast is sponsored by HippoCamp 2018. Now in its fourth year, HippoCamp is a three-day Pennsylvania writing conference that features 50-plus speakers, engaging sessions in four tracks, interactive all-conference panels, author and attendee readings, social activities, networking opportunities, and optional intimate pre-conference workshops.
00:00:26
Speaker
The conference takes place in lovely Lancaster, Pennsylvania from August 24th through August 26th. Visit hippocampusmagazine.com and click the conference tab in the toolbar. And if you enter the keyword CNF pod at checkout, you'll receive a $50 discount that buys you a lot of books.
00:00:48
Speaker
This offer is only good until August 10th or until all those tickets are sold and they are going fast. There are limited numbers so act now. Hippo Camp 2018, create, share, live.
Jean Guerrero's Background
00:01:03
Speaker
Today I'm joined by a special guest. You may have heard of her, maybe not, but nevertheless her name is Jean Guerrero. She is a television reporter for KPBS in San Diego covering immigration.
00:01:15
Speaker
Too bad that's not a topical subject. She is the winner of the Penn Fusion Emerging Writers Prize and has worked for the Wall Street Journal and has won several reporting awards. Most recently, she is the author of Crux, a cross-border memoir published by Random House.
What inspired 'Crux'?
00:01:36
Speaker
It's a story about her discovering her father by crossing borders both physical and spiritual.
00:01:44
Speaker
My father knew why I was writing this book, and he wanted me to write it for the same reason.
00:01:55
Speaker
This is the show where I speak to the world's best artists about telling true stories, how those stories are told, and why it matters. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast.
Editing Process and Challenges
00:02:08
Speaker
We start today's conversation about how edits early in the draft, like significant changes, have this cascade effect throughout the entire piece. Please enjoy this show, episode 109.
00:02:25
Speaker
It was actually a lot of printing stuff out and laying everything out on my floor. And luckily I live by myself and I have like a, at the time I hardly had any furniture because I had just moved into this condo. So I was just laying out all, I mean not all of the pages at once, but I would take
00:02:49
Speaker
several chapters at once and just lay them all out on the floor and just visualizing them like that really helped me to get a handle on structure and figuring out what would happen if I moved things around and how to fix things if I did move things around. I feel like when I was editing the book, because it's so long, when I would be staring at it on a computer screen,
00:03:19
Speaker
my brain was so used to being immersed in it that way that it was easy to miss really obvious mistakes or really obvious solutions to problems that when I printed it out, it was like this fresh perspective, literally, and allowed me to just
00:03:46
Speaker
get a clear picture for how to move things around without messing everything up. Do you have any concrete example of a part that might have been early in the story and then that got moved to the latter half or vice versa? Let's see. I do remember, so there was this scene where
00:04:16
Speaker
My father is, it's his first memory. And in that memory, he is crying for a reason that he can't remember. And this is something that both he told me and my grandmother told me. But basically he was crying and his mother who rarely got an opportunity to go out.
00:04:46
Speaker
her brother had offered to take her to the cinema and my dad as a baby, she was like three years old, he was crying and crying and so they decided to just leave him in the house because they didn't want to not go to the movies just because they had this crying baby and my dad ends up like breaking the window and crawling outside
00:05:10
Speaker
And sitting on this bench and after that he becomes, he starts to sleepwalk and he stops crying. He used to be a boy who was prone to tears. But after that he just, he stopped crying. And that scene I had initially had it in my father's section of the book. So my book is basically this tapestry of stories and I have
00:05:37
Speaker
an entire section in there that is told from my father's point of view, and then an entire section in there that's told from my grandmother's point of view. And I had initially had that scene in my father's section, but then I realized that because my father's section comes so late in the book, I needed to create more empathy for my father as a character early on in the book.
00:06:05
Speaker
And I realized that a way to do this was to bring that scene, which my grandmother also recalled, to bring that into her section, which occurs earlier in the book. Because when the reader is first getting to know my father, they're getting to know him through my eyes. And when I was a little girl, he was a really enchanting father.
00:06:28
Speaker
really involved father, a stay-at-home dad while my mother was a doctor and he would always take me outside and things. But for the most part, he's just this mystery and he's eventually he starts smoking crack and becomes convinced that the CIA is after him. So it might be difficult for readers to empathize with him because they don't really understand why he's
00:06:53
Speaker
behaving in these ways. And I realized that a way to hold the reader's interest in my father was to bring this anecdote and a few other little anecdotes just earlier in the book. And so I was able to move it up to my grandmother's section when I saw it laid out on the floor and I realized that I could bring it up to my grandmother's section because she had also confirmed that this had happened.
00:07:18
Speaker
And you said something interesting that about your dad as a character, you know, in the book. So like in within those pages, of course, he is a character in a in a story you're trying to tell it. So how was that? How difficult was that for you to maybe divorce the two, the the father that you just, you know, as a family member versus a character in a book that you're looking to in a story you're trying to tell?
Portraying Family in Memoir
00:07:48
Speaker
So, I mean, because it's nonfiction, it's all based on reality or as much of it as it, I mean, there are sections in there that, like I said, are told from my father's point of view. And the way that I justify those as a journalist is I frame them within the context of my conversation with my father so that the reader knows I'm not saying that this is what actually happened. I'm just saying this is what my father told me happened.
00:08:15
Speaker
So I had to try and be as faithful to reality as possible. I do have to think about it. I do have to think about my father as a character and myself as a character when I'm trying to distill a very complicated reality onto the page and make it interesting for people. And one of the ways that that was hard in terms of my dad was I love my dad.
00:08:45
Speaker
And that's in part because he's my dad and because I know him so well. At first, I think I kind of just assumed that people would be willing to invest time and energy in reading my father's story and that they would trust that eventually I would show them why it was worthwhile.
00:09:10
Speaker
when struggle was, was realizing like, no, I have to, I have to build my father as a character on the page. I have to, I can't just trust that the reader is going to, is going to trust me that my father's interesting. I have to make him multidimensional on the page as he is in reality. And, and I guess it was just, it was, it was in particularly, it was particularly difficult with my father because
00:09:36
Speaker
My fascination and my obsession with him is rooted in childhood. It's easy for me to assume that people will find him fascinating as well. And I had to really build that and show the reader step by step why he was interesting.
00:09:59
Speaker
Yeah, and some of the character building with anything means you also have to withhold and maybe restrain some information so it's not just this dump of this is what he's like. And that must be hard for you to show that restraint and also say hard for anyone who's a character in a narrative like this, who's a real person.
00:10:26
Speaker
You know, early on, you might know information. The character in the book doesn't know what's going on, but the narrator from several years down the road knows how it ends. So early on, it can feel kind of judgmental, but it's like, no, you got to tease it out and let it play out. And so that must have been hard. How did you choose to approach that?
Balancing Truth and Narrative
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, so one of the breakthroughs in the editing process I remember was when I realized that I could leave my father as a mystery for a while, because he was the mystery that I was trying to solve. And I didn't, because my initial compulsion was to kind of dump all of the information, like,
00:11:19
Speaker
Because when I first realized, OK, not everybody sympathizes with my father, I was like, OK, so I have to give them all of the reasons why they should empathize right away. And so my first solution was, I think in chapter one, I just dumped all this information about how he was abused as a child and all of his friends dying when he was a teenager and just all the different traumas that he experienced. I just dumped that all in chapter one
00:11:49
Speaker
And then I realized that that was not the answer either. I don't know. At some point, I just realized I could make the mystery explicit. I could say, I think when he meets my mom in chapter one, I say that there are certain memories of his childhood that he's trying to repress, that he spends most of his time actively not thinking about.
00:12:17
Speaker
And I realized that that was a solution. It was basically my way of promising the reader, telling the reader, I promise you, he's not just tapping my mother's telephone line randomly. He's not just a mentally ill person. He's a very complicated person. There are reasons for why he's acting this way. And then I just slowly build on that, like I said, bringing the anecdote about my father
00:12:48
Speaker
my father's first memory not being allowed to cry early on and I mean it was just it was basically just a lot of time and and searching within the narrative because I wrote I honestly I wrote the book really really quickly I think I had most of it written by the time I started my MFA program like a hundred
00:13:13
Speaker
40,000 words, way longer than the actual book ended up being. And then the difficulty was just pairing it down and creating the right structure. And that just involved a lot of staring at the pages and cutting them up. It was like I was playing with a puzzle on my floor and that just helped me.
00:13:44
Speaker
What kind of models were you using and models? I mean like other books you might have drawn inspiration from to inform the structure and the way you went about writing crooks. One book that gave me the courage, I don't know if I don't want to say courage, but one book that showed me that I could make this book a tapestry of stories
00:14:11
Speaker
rather than having just like just one voice and one narrative, was everything is illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer, which I read a long, long time ago. But I just remember, like, I really liked the switches in perspective in that book. And so that was one book. But then the book that most informed the structure was probably Isabel Allende's
00:14:42
Speaker
Paula, which is a memoir that she wrote to, it's in the format of a letter to her daughter. When her daughter was in a coma, Isabel Allende started to write this letter that turned into a book where she was basically trying to bring her daughter back to life by telling her the family history. And it's really heartbreaking because Paula ends up never, she never wakes up, she ends up dying her daughter.
00:15:12
Speaker
um but it's this incredibly remarkable book because it's fueled by this very intense desperation like I am telling you this story because I need you to come back to me and that like I found that book about it was in my third semester in my MFA program and like I said I'd already written most of the book but when I found that
00:15:42
Speaker
I realized that I could make explicit a lot of the desires that were motivating me to write this book. My father was suicidal at the time that I was writing it. And I realized I didn't have to hide those things. Like as a journalist, I wanted to be very objective and like have this, I had this impulse to be very objective and to be very cohesive.
00:16:12
Speaker
and coherent. And I think those two books that I just mentioned made me realize that I could be a little more playful with the structure and also really intimate and subjective with it. Like I needed my father to know that part of the reason I was writing it was for him.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yeah, the the struggle that I've had of late is similarly writing a memoir about my father and my baseball career and how we're tied to that. And being I've been working on it for a long time and I've, it's been a real and I swear this has a point.
00:16:56
Speaker
It's been a real struggle to talk to him about things that are very sensitive and things that don't shine him in a very flattering light at all. And it's been tough and he's been walled off and that's just the Boston Irish Catholic and I'm just like, we don't talk about this stuff. And so it's...
00:17:18
Speaker
And when I was reading Crocs, I was just floored by the courage it must have taken you to be able to ask your family these and interview them and ask them these questions and get them on the record for the story.
00:17:34
Speaker
But also their willingness and courage to tell it. So how did you approach that? That's something I'm struggling with and I suspect other people are too. And the way you've approached it, it was like, wow, this is raw and so touching and moving and emotive.
Interviewing Family for Memoir
00:17:52
Speaker
And it's like, how did you do it? How did you earn that trust to handle their stories the way you did? I think it was
00:18:04
Speaker
honestly just a lot of time and sincere obsession. Like my mom is an extremely private person and I think at first she was just like hoping that I would eventually become interested in something else but she eventually became one of the most supportive people in my family when it comes to my book even though she's extremely private and when I was a teenager and this is in the book she was
00:18:33
Speaker
always telling, it was a shame to her that my father had these issues and she wanted me to hide them and not tell anybody about them and not even think about them and to just forget about my father because he was a shame in her eyes when I was a teenager. And I think she eventually realized that I wasn't going to be able to forget about him and that my interest was really sincere. And same with my dad. I mean, my dad,
00:19:04
Speaker
He's not a private person in the same sense as my mother, but his initial concern when he started telling me these stories and I told him I wanted to write a book, his initial concern was like, the CIA is going to come after you. Like, you can't do this. You're just asking for trouble. Yeah. And then we just kept talking and it was years of conversations, both with my father and with my mother and with
00:19:33
Speaker
My grandmother, I mean, I quit my job at the Wall Street Journal in Mexico City. I think that's when they realized I was very serious about this because I loved my job. I loved my job. And I think, I don't know, they just, it's hard because I really empathize with people whose family members don't want to cooperate. I can't imagine what that would be like because
00:20:03
Speaker
I remember I was really, really scared of that. And initially that was the case, but I just kept going and going. And eventually they realized that I wasn't trying to do anything bad. I was, this was just like a part of my evolution. And if they loved me, they had to, they had to let me do it. Um, and they had, they had to trust me to do it in a way that would be sensitive to, to them. And I, and I got really, really lucky and they opened up to me, but, um,
00:20:31
Speaker
But I don't know. I really don't know what the secret is. I know that spending a lot of time having these conversations with them and showing them that it wasn't about money or fame or anger. I was trying to get back at them for whatever. It was about trying to grow past this.
00:21:01
Speaker
to move beyond everything that had happened. And I couldn't do it except through this book because I'm a writer and I've always been a writer and I'm sorry. And I think they just like, I don't know. I feel really, really lucky that they came around to it. And my grandmother, who's a very private person, she, I think she saw it.
Empathy and Storytelling
00:21:21
Speaker
I hope she never listens to this, but I think she saw it as a chance to
00:21:30
Speaker
to have revenge. Like she realized that if she told me all of the things that she had experienced, that was her way of having the last word and, and, and regain control over her life because she had endured so much and just been walked all over and raped and controlled by men. And she, she saw me and she realized like, wow, like, you know, I can just,
00:22:00
Speaker
liberate myself of all of this and just tell her and then and I'm the one who has the last word and I don't know being a part of that honestly makes me feel really really good. I mean not the revenge thing but the fact that she can liberate herself of some of these traumas like in a lot of our conversations she would break into tears and she had never shared these things with anybody else and I was so scared to have those conversations with her but then I realized how
00:22:30
Speaker
how much they seemed to make her feel better. And so I felt great after that. And when you were interviewing your family members, and as you know, as a reporter, sometimes asking tough questions can come across as being judgmental. So how did you approach interviewing your family with questions about their past, maybe their behavior?
00:22:58
Speaker
and how they treated you and how they treated each other and so forth and get them to talk openly without it sounding like you were judging them for that behavior. That's a good question. I mean, with my dad, it was from the very beginning, from our very first conversation where he started opening up to me while I was in journalism school, he started opening up to me about the CIA.
00:23:25
Speaker
And I remember one of the first questions that I asked him was one of those tough questions. I was like, well, how do you know you're not hallucinating? What you're describing sounds like hallucinations. And I remember I was so scared to ask that question because I thought it would make him not want to open up to me anymore. But I don't know. There was just, I think, I think a lot of people want to open up about
00:23:56
Speaker
the really difficult things that happened to them. At least, I don't know, at least in my dad's case and my grandmother's case, like they just, they'd never been heard before. And so having tough questions, yes, made them uncomfortable and made me uncomfortable because I hated making them uncomfortable, especially my grandmother. But in the end, they kind of just put up with it and they,
00:24:26
Speaker
I don't know, there never was a point where my father became suspicious of me and my motives and said, wait, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to expose? Are you trying to make me look crazy or something? He never doubted that my curiosity was sincere. And I don't know, maybe that's just a trait of my father.
00:24:52
Speaker
I'm not saying it was necessarily a strategy of my interviewing technique. I guess if it was something that I was doing, it was the fact that I was really listening and I was really entertaining the possibility that what he was saying was true. But I had to ask, I had to also be like, well, what are you talking about? Like, okay, convince me because it doesn't make any sense. And that would end up giving me some of my best nuggets, I think. He would explain,
00:25:22
Speaker
part of his evidence for these alleged CIA mind control experiments was that he never experienced the torture while he was on airplanes because the aluminum alloys of the plane protected him. And so he would answer my really, really tough questions with trying to be scientific, trying to be logical about it. And it was fascinating to me to hear his reasons
00:25:50
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, you just, you just have to listen and make people realize that you're not out to get them.
00:25:59
Speaker
Yeah, he taught you a pretty valuable lesson about journalism, about interviewing. You know, part way through the book, I have this passage cited, it was, after a minute of small talk, Poppy leaned back a little, he casually told the man why we were visiting with the man mind answering questions for a news article. I didn't know it at the time, but I would go on to use my father's lesson throughout my career. And I thought that was, yeah,
00:26:27
Speaker
Because you went in with more of that – it's kind of like you're dead, like a hard intent in journalism school going at with like the hard thing first and here he is kind of softening up a potential source and like he took that in. So how formative was that? It was extremely formative. I mean, yeah, like now when I'm interviewing officials and things like that,
00:26:51
Speaker
It's different because if I'm doing a TV interview, maybe I'll ask someone easy question to begin with, then I'll dive right into the hard stuff. But when I'm doing reporting out in the field and I'm talking to corn producers or deported migrants, I'm just trying to get to know them first.
00:27:16
Speaker
And my dad told me, yeah, when I was still a journalism student, I really, like, I just kept going. Because he accompanied me on some of my stories that I was working on as a student in Mexico. And he was just giving me these tips about how to just be real with people. Because like with my mom, who's a doctor and very professional and
00:27:45
Speaker
just very, very different from my father. She had taught me to be a certain way in professional settings. Like, you know, like you have to be in control and confidence and give off this vibe of knowing, knowing what you're doing. And my dad was like, no, like you just gotta, you gotta just get to know the person and be casual with them and let them know like you're both
00:28:14
Speaker
humans and and I guess I ended up using that with him too eventually. Yeah, well, there's an element of that that can be kind of like pre-reporting to where it is a bit of a softer encounter that you're feeling things that you're getting some background information like is there really a story here and then then that allows you to start diving deeper if you really feel like there is someone capable of carrying your story from beginning to end.
00:28:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, a story that I've been following for KPBS and NPR and PBS News Hour, I actually haven't followed it in a while because I had to switch gears under the Trump administration. But under the Obama administration, more people were deported than under any administration. And so I was following the lives of deported migrants living in Tijuana, many of them.
00:29:13
Speaker
have children in the United States and are just living in Tijuana because they're waiting for an opportunity to go back to the States. And they experience all kinds of horrible discrimination and abuse from the police. And many of them have to live in sewers because that's the only place that they feel safe. And I remember that whole series, which ended up like the Tijuana police chief
00:29:43
Speaker
was asked to resign literally the day that one of my reports showing these terrible police raids aired nationally on NewsHour and he blamed a perverse media campaign. So it was a series of investigations that had all sorts of consequences, but it all started with
00:30:10
Speaker
me just like standing on the street outside of a Costco in Tijuana and there was this drunk uh there was this drunk guy i didn't realize he was drunk um and i and i went up to him to ask him a question oh yeah i asked him like are you deported um and he was like yes and i have eight children in the united states and and i realized he was really drunk and i think most most people would have uh
00:30:39
Speaker
have probably been like, Aria, I'm leaving. But, um, but he, I don't know if something about him reminded me of my dad, like his eyes or something. And, um, and I just kept talking to him and he ended up being one of my most trusted sources. He's a total alcoholic, but, um, he, he, he's really someone that I can trust and, and ended up introducing me to all sorts of other deported migrants in Tijuana and
00:31:08
Speaker
ended up taking me into the sewers with him. And yeah, I mean, I wouldn't have trusted anybody else, but it was all just from his totally random encounter where I just, yeah, I just encountered him in the street and just hung out with him for a while, kind of because he reminded me of my dad. A lot of my sources I've realized throughout my life
00:31:35
Speaker
remind me of my father. I don't know what's going on there. But some of my best stories come from sources who remind me of my dad. When you read the book, you realize that people who might be like your dad or this source that you had outside the Costco, that people might be afraid to approach someone that might come across as intoxicated or unhinged.
00:32:01
Speaker
And maybe they're judging them and they're walking a big arc around these people. But you have the courage and maybe a little bit of sensitivity to be like, no, that's a person too. My dad's a person even though he might have his hang ups and his problems or addictions. And he's got value to add and a story to tell. And you've got that courage and that empathy to approach those people. That's right. Yeah, I never thought about it that way. But I think that's totally
00:32:30
Speaker
On the mark, some of the people who might frighten other people or seem like they're not credible sources, I just empathize with them right away because I'm my father's daughter and I know that there is humanity there.
00:32:50
Speaker
there's a part two in the book where a teacher, a teacher of yours recommended or, or even gave you a copy of Mary cars, a liar's club. And, uh, and you say, he said that, uh, you know, you, you aren't doomed because of your father. You can turn bad things into good things.
Turning Adversity into Growth
00:33:09
Speaker
So what was that moment like? And how did that kind of advance you forward? It was incredible. Um,
00:33:19
Speaker
I have always remembered that when he gave me that book and I thanked him repeatedly since then because I definitely wouldn't, I really don't think I would have ever written this book or I would have written like a novel based on my father's life or something. But yeah, I mean, I, for so long, I kind of ran away from
00:33:47
Speaker
growing up um by hiding under this idea of like oh like I'm I'm doomed to become like my father um because my mother she was she had a lot of stresses her her own father was dying in our house of diabetes really severe complications from diabetes while I was a teenager and so she was kind of um not easy to get along with um when I was a teenager and and she would
00:34:17
Speaker
lash out sometimes by by saying that I was like my father and um and and so I remember I started to to to think like I'm doomed to become like him um but it was it was like it it almost made me feel it was an excuse for not growing up because I was just I always just hid inside of that I was like I don't take responsibility for any of my self-destructive behavior because
00:34:45
Speaker
It's just inevitable. It's unavoidable. It's in my genes, yeah. It's in my genes. And then I was writing personal essays for Mr. Brown's class that explored this whole idea of me being doomed. And I guess he saw something in me as a writer and realized that I was thinking about things in completely the wrong way and just
00:35:14
Speaker
decided to push me by giving me this book and telling me to kind of re rewire my thinking about it. And so then so then writing nonfiction, for me became about, okay, like, let's figure this out, like, 10, like, how much of my father do I really have in me? And how much of that is good? And how much of that should I try to walk away from? And writing became
00:35:44
Speaker
Therapeutic in that regard. Therapeutic isn't even the right word. It was like this tool that I used to excavate things from myself that I didn't feel were useful to me anymore if I wanted to grow up.
00:36:02
Speaker
And you mentioned potentially novelizing your father's life. And there's a part way through the book, a colleague of yours in Mexico, he was like, novels, you're like, me, Nina, living here, what you write won't have to be fiction. In Mexico, things happen that don't happen anywhere else. And maybe think like that could have been, was that a moment to you when you realized that sometimes that truth is stranger than fiction?
00:36:33
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. Cause even when I moved to Mexico, I, so I always had this, I don't even know when I, I think in high school I started to have this idea of writing a book about my dad, but I was always thinking about it as fiction.
Choosing Nonfiction for 'Crux'
00:36:47
Speaker
And even when I went to Mexico, I was still kind of thinking about it as fiction. Um, but then I realized, I mean, I was thinking about it as fiction because I thought like it would be much easier to, to write an interesting novel.
00:37:02
Speaker
if I wasn't bound by reality, because sometimes reality is boring. I mean, it doesn't do exactly what we want it to as storytellers. But yeah, but then I moved to Mexico and my source said that to me. And I also started to realize that my father had this really magical history, like literally magical ancestry with a great grandmother who
00:37:31
Speaker
was well known in southern Mexico for allegedly being a clairvoyant who could commune with spirits. And so I realized that I could explore those parallels between her voices and visions and my father's voices and visions. And there was just more and more mystery
00:37:56
Speaker
and magic that I was discovering in Mexico. And eventually I realized, OK, I have to make this nonfiction. It's going to be way, it's not, it wasn't even about being, I was about to say it's going to be way more interesting. But actually what I meant was, it's just, I knew it was going to be more useful to me if I wrote it as nonfiction and more challenging. And that was exciting to me, to know that my only raw material was reality.
00:38:25
Speaker
The challenge of that was exciting.
00:38:28
Speaker
And there's a part towards the end, an email, I believe you wrote to him that was in that email. I love this sentence. It says, I think you know that lying, keeping secrets, and refusing to acknowledge the past are what poison us as human beings. It's hiding that closes the soul. That just kind of really struck me. And I was wondering, how were you and,
00:38:58
Speaker
able to open up in a sense that honor that sentence that you wrote? If somebody were to ask him why he opened up to me and he didn't have the fears about the CIA coming after him and he felt like he could be 100% honest, I think he would want to say, you know, I opened up to her because I want the world to know what the CIA is doing to me. I want the world
00:39:23
Speaker
to know that I'm the victim of these CIA mind control experiments. But I think deep down, I think he's really being honest with himself. He opened up to me because he believed in the power of the truth and honesty. And he wanted to share his experience with me. Like he needed to get it off of his chest. Like I feel like
00:39:54
Speaker
that was a gift to my father, the fact that I was a journalist and I allowed him to do that because so much of his life, he'd just been dismissed and silenced and sent to rehab. And I'm not trying to paint my father as a victim. He's very much responsible for his own actions and mistakes and substantive use.
00:40:23
Speaker
But yeah, I think that as a person who has suffered, having that opportunity to open up to somebody was something that he believes that that might liberate him of something. I don't think he, I guess I'm speaking for him and I don't want to speak for him, but I really, I think that's the only
00:40:49
Speaker
reason I feel, the only reason I felt comfortable writing this book is because I have faith. It's weird. I'm a journalist and I'm talking about faith, but I have faith that my father knew why I was writing this book and, and he wanted, he wanted me to write it for the same reasons.
00:41:11
Speaker
How did your outlook or your impression and maybe your skepticism of your father change when you were looking him in the eye and he was telling you these stories to you and to you?
00:41:30
Speaker
Like was there a part of you that always, that thought a lot of it was, was bullshit. And then when you got, when you were looking him dead in the eye and he's telling you what's, what's happening and you're like, Oh, you know what, this is, uh, this is changing my view and my impressions of my dad that who I thought I knew. Well, yeah, I mean, because firstly, like I always just had this really big concept of him in my mind as being,
00:41:58
Speaker
a schizophrenic, like I don't like using that label like a schizophrenic. I mean, I believe in the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and I believe it can be very helpful to people. But I was thinking of my father in a reductive way where I was just seeing him as a schizophrenic. And then when he started to share his stories with me, I realized that there was real fear and real conviction behind his belief.
00:42:28
Speaker
And that's what motivated me to keep having these conversations with him and ultimately to realize that I could write a book about my quest to discover the truth about him is because it was so compelling. Like he really believes the things that he's saying. And honestly, I am very vulnerable to the power of suggestion and there
00:42:57
Speaker
And I think it's weird. I honestly do believe that this is what makes me a good journalist. The particular strength that I have is that when I'm listening to people, I am listening. And sometimes I will get carried away by their stories. Sometimes my father would be telling me these stories and I'd really start to think, oh my God, what if
00:43:21
Speaker
What if this really happened to him? I mean, the CIA did do something like this in the 1950s and 60s, targeting people just like him, people without credibility, drug addicts, prisoners. I mean, what if? And honestly, yeah, I mean, you never know. I did all these Freedom of Information Act requests and nothing came of it.
00:43:48
Speaker
I mean, I don't want to give away my conclusions in the book, but I did want to highlight that there were many moments where I would get caught up in my father's story. And that was part of my reason for writing it, because he was so magnetic to me, almost too much so. He had so much gravity to him. And all my life, I was sort of following in his footsteps. And I needed to write the book to separate myself
00:44:17
Speaker
from him and separate facts from fiction and then try to figure out what was real and what wasn't real. Lastly, where can people find you online and maybe become more familiar with your work? So people can visit my website, genegarrero.com, or check out my work on KPBS.
00:44:45
Speaker
Thank you so much for the time and for the opportunity to talk about my book. It's been great. Thanks for your work, and we'll be in touch, Jean. Thanks so much for your time.
00:45:00
Speaker
Hey, did you enjoy the show? Be sure to tweet us some love. I'm at Brendan O'Mara and at CNF Pod. Give a follow, say hello. And Gene is at Gene Gare. J-E-A-N-G-U-E-R-R-E. If you have a moment,
00:45:20
Speaker
and you have made it this far, please consider leaving an honest review on Apple Podcasts. And if you want more goodies, head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes to all of the episodes, but also sign up for my monthly reading list newsletter that's monthly, so once a month, first of the month, no spam and you can't beat it. Thanks again to Hippocam 2018 for sponsoring the show. Be sure to register by August 10th and use that CNF pod coupon code
00:45:46
Speaker
to save $50 on your registration. I know I can use 50 bucks. I'm outta here seeing efforts. See ya!