Your story in this year’s Fiction Issue, “Firstborn Immigrant Daughter,” is written in the form of a letter to the firstborn daughter of immigrants. When did you first start thinking of this as the premise for a piece of fiction?

For me, with fiction, the “first thought” is invariably a first line—appearing out of nowhere, clarion clear. I’ve likened the sensation to hearing a lyric from a song that I know but can’t recall. With my novel, “Ghana Must Go,” that first line arrived at a retreat in Sweden; with this story, at a retreat in Brazil. I recently launched Sechat, an international writing workshop (named after the Egyptian goddess of writing), for precisely this reason—to offer women writers the quiet to hear their lyrics, the inspiration to write them down. So often, for women creatives, “peace and quiet” alone won’t do. We need permission and quiet, a container and quiet, community and quiet, too.

In the story, a “we” of firstborn immigrant daughters is addressing the letter’s recipient—the story’s “you”—whose situation they are assessing, analyzing, and almost embodying from a vantage point of knowledge and empathy. Why did you make this choice? Did you ever think of employing the first-person singular?

Speaking of retreats, I love to teach, and narrative voice is my favorite subject. In more than a decade of teaching second-person and first-person plural, I’ve learned the power of these voices: inherently experimental, they turn writers (back) into experimenters. I give my students Joshua Ferris’s novel “Then We Came to the End” (“we”) and Tope Folarin’s story “Miracle” (“we” and “you”), then ask them to try either voice—and the same thing happens every time. They have fun! They don’t know the rules, so they’re not afraid of breaking them. They play. Me, too. I suffer from Stage IV Perfectionism, so I edit myself mercilessly in first and third person. Second person returns me, mercifully, to Beginner’s Mind.

The mother-daughter relationship being explored here is a complex one. How did you figure out how to structure the story and tease out the various strands of the bond between any such pair of mothers and daughters?

So many mothers and daughters appear in this story: friends, cousins, fictional characters. That “you” is a compression of a massive amount of data collected over decades. In the other languages I speak (Italian and Portuguese), there exists a second-person plural: voi and vocês, distinct from tu. But there’s something lovely about the limits of the singular “you” in English. No matter how many “tu” are contained in the “voi” of a narrator, a reader is always singular. One reader may see themselves in certain sections of this story, but not in others. Another one may feel seen. But it’s always a one-to-one conversation—or exploration, just as you say. As an artist (not a sociologist), I offer observations and questions—not answers. Brown women artists are often confused with anthropologists. My work (and my joy) is to explore, not explain.

At one point, you write, “When the mothers of your friends from the New Country coo, ‘All I want is for my daughter to be happy,’ you laugh. Your mother doesn’t want her daughter to be happy. Your mother wants her daughter to be impressive.” For a girl, how challenging is it to grow up with those kinds of expectations when her peers might be having a completely different experience of childhood and adolescence?

It’s an invisible challenge, no? We know that girls outperform boys at school. We know that immigrant girls—here I include class migrants, permanently emigrating from the underclass to the upper—are pushed to outperform their peers. But we rarely stop to ask: Who is working harder, in any country, than an immigrant daughter? Founders, lawyers, novelists, pharmacists, actresses, a former Secretary of State—is there any single demographic more consistently high-performing? Because we often occupy (or ascend to) the same social rank as nonimmigrant men, these men are called our “peers.” But I know few nonimmigrant men who can match the hustle of an immigrant daughter. If we ran twice as far, twice as fast, to reach the same point as these men—then, by definition, we are faster runners (not equals). Our hustle is peerless.

Sex makes its way into the story, first, from the mother’s perspective, as something to be avoided, and then as something that has to lead to procreation—and soon. You write, “Your mother insists that she gives great advice. You insist that she gives only warnings.” Was it fun to think about what advice would be useful to have?

Oh, I love this question! And, funny enough, this is what I was saying about writing in unconventional voices. Learning to create art is like learning to sustain love: you must feel safe enough to fail. If you’re afraid to get it wrong, to be exposed, to be disappointed? If you self-flagellate when you fall short? You deny yourself the room, the right, and the grace to learn. To grow. First drafts and healthy relationships are fed by the same nutrients: patience, play, curiosity, humility. And joy. The most useful advice I know is the same for both: Begin again. ♦