LM: I am enormously influenced by place. As an only child with a single mom who moved around all the time, I got to spend a lot of time alone growing up in foreign countries and on weekends and holidays all Mom wanted to do was travel, so that was a huge thing for me, taking in places. High school in Mexico City was the subject I wanted to write about first; ever since I graduated and moved back to the States, I knew that if I succeeded in writing a novel, my first would be “the Mexico City high school project.”  It was just such a unique world: bodyguards and drivers waiting outside the school for certain kids, the extreme nature of the city–altitude, pollution, beauty, chaos, history, freedom…the warmth of the culture, the gap between social classes, political assassinations that hit close to home, the chance that something could happen to my mother with the kinds of cases she had to work on…it was overall such an intense experience I couldn’t not write about it.

In this case it was place, this city, that sprung the novel.  In my new project place is important, too, but not as important. It’s more about someone’s ability to stay in a place. It’s a story of friendship and family, and has more to do with the absurdity of certain laws regarding marriage and immigration.  So the new work is primarily character-driven, but there’s still that international component and cultural commentary that I think will always be important to my writing – I’ve got some ideas for the characters’ adventures in Turkey, Italy, and Los Angeles and the book is still in its formative stages.

LM: I’ve had reactions running the gamut from complete love to total hatred and offense! I meant nothing to be a literal depiction, which is why I went with fiction in the first place rather than a memoir of those years.  It’s funny because if everything were a flattering portrait and the characters didn’t have flaws and lapses in judgment, there would be no conflict and no way could it be about teenagers at all.  My intent was never to portray the world or characters in a negative light–Mila is far from perfect herself–but rather for Mila to function as a sponge absorbing this world, with all the excitement and danger that goes along with it.  The characters are composites of parts of myself and imagination, as well as exaggerated traits of people I’d known here and there, but no character is an exact replica of anyone I knew.  When Mila leaves Mexico she says she’s going “from one simulacrum of my life to another” – which I intended as a wink to the Mexico City in the book being a manipulated, fictional version of an actual place, the way Mila feels her life is a series of fictions as dictated by her mother’s moves–that she herself can never feel quite real or complete because she lacks roots, pieces of identity, and a place to genuinely feel at home.