This is a summary of my life and my work. Don't believe everything I say, I tend to exaggerate a bit. However, I always stick to poetic truth, as the thieves in Eduardo Galeano's story about the old man and the letters. Remember? In any case, the really important stuff, is not in my résumé. It happened almost unnoticed in the secret chambers of the heart.

I am a writer because I was blessed with an ear for stories, an unhappy childhood, and a strange family. (With relatives as weird as mine there is no need to invent anything, they alone provide all the material for magic realism). Literature has defined me. Word by word, page after page, I have invented this hyperbolic flamboyant me.

In the last twenty years I have learned one thing for sure, my friends: nothing makes my soul sing more than writing. It makes me feel young, strong, powerful, happy. Wow! It is as invigorating as making love with the perfect lover, which in any case, is almost impossible at my age...

From the fabric of life novels are made. A novel is a long and patient proposition, like embroidering a tapestry of many threads and colors. I work by instinct, without knowing very well what I am doing, until one day I turn it over and look at the design. I never really end a book, I just give up. There is always more to tell, another twist in the plot, another surprising character, more that could be changed, edited or deepened. A story is a living creature with it's own destiny and my job is to allow it to tell itself. I enjoy the process of writing without thinking much of the final result. That's my agent and my publishers' concern...

I love the time I spend alone and in silence in my study, weeks adding details to create the unique world of the story, months allowing the characters to grow and to talk for themselves, years trying to understand their motivations and their passions. A novel requires passion, patience and dedication, it is a total commitment, like falling in love. For me the first impulse that triggers the writing is always a profound emotion that has been with me for a long time; time reveals the motivations and gives me enough distance, ambiguity and irony to narrate it. It is difficult to write in the middle of the hurricane, it is preferable to recreate the story after the furious winds have passed and I can make some sense of the debris. Struggle, losses, confusion, memory, those are the raw materials of my writing.

For me life becomes real when I write it. What I don't write is erased by the winds of oblivion. I forget a lot, my mind betrays me, I can't recall places, names, dates or faces, but I never forget a good story... or a significant dream. Writing is a silent introspection, a journey to the dark caverns of memory and the soul. Fiction, like memory, moves from revelation to revelation.

I write because I need to remember and overcome. It is from memory and a sense of loss that the passion to create emerges. Every book is an act of love, an offering that I prepare with great care, hoping that it will be well received.