John Freeman started off the December California Book Club meeting to talk about Carribean Fragoza’s collection, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, by asking Fragoza what her state of mind had been when she started writing the stories as an undergraduate student at UCLA. Fragoza said, “I know UCLA is not that far away from El Monte, but it really is another world. The west side is a whole other planet.”
She said she’d felt alienated and alone, but then started working at a campus diner. “That was the first time I felt not just that I belonged, but I felt like I was in the company of people who cared about me.” The people working there were working-class women, primarily Latina women from Mexico and Central America, who would take the bus to UCLA every day to work in the diner. Fragoza said, “We would serve really stinky lasagna and spaghetti to undergraduate students at a dining hall at the dorms, and so I did there what I always did growing up, which was shut up and listen…to their stories.” Their gossip was nurturing for her and inspired a story in Fragoza’s book, “Crystal Palace,” as well as a couple of other stories.
Simultaneously, she was taking literature classes in Chicano studies and comparative literature. She was blown away by the writing of Helena María Vieramontes and Jamaica Kincaid, both authors with powerful voices; Fragoza wanted to embody that in her own writing practice, and she began writing short stories.
Freeman asked about Fragoza’s relationship to writing as a child. Fragoza explained that she’d taken to writing immediately as a child. “It felt like a very safe space for me to express my interests, like New Kids on the Block or polar bears or whatever was my interest at the time.” She also had a lot of doubts about her future growing up.
Fragoza explained that because her parents are immigrants, there were a lot of questions about where the family would live in the future and where they were going to go. “Maybe a lot of children experienced this, but it certainly was my experience, that I felt a lot of pressures from the environment that I was growing up in, in El Monte. It felt harsh and kind of also unforgiving in certain ways. And so I turned to writing as a way to carve a space for myself where I could explore just my inner workings, and I found strength and some kind of power in that that I was able to carry in my life outside of the page.”
Author Kelly Link joined the conversation, commenting that she found Fragoza’s stories gorgeous and surprising. She also noted Fragoza’s many collaborations and work outside her own short stories. Link asked, “What do you take back from working as part of a collective? From being an editor? What do you take back to your own work when you sit down to write?”
Fragoza commented that while wearing different hats, she’s learned to immerse herself in other worlds and perspectives. She said, “I think that’s crucial to being a fiction writer in particular, finding different ways, approaches to entering perspectives and entering worlds, and, I think, writing about art, it’s an opportunity to…enter worlds through the material, through objects.”
Link commented that as the reader, she thought about the way the fantastic and the peculiar arose out of family dynamics in the collection and how true that felt to her. She asked how these familial relationships “become monstrous or fantastical or just strange.” Fragoza commented that it took her a while to see that the collection was about family. It was her editor, Elaine Katzenberger, who suggested a shift from Fragoza’s original title, Vicious Ladies, to Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, which brought a different focus to the themes and the work, especially around family and relationships between mothers and daughters. “It gave me a more nuanced, more complex perspective in my work to see the throughline.”
Link said that it feels as though Fragoza is operating between two poles: tenderness and an unforgiving eye. She said, “Reading your work makes me think that maybe those two things are actually the same thing, that both tenderness, but also the unforgiving eye, is just that ability to look at a person and a piece of fiction and describe them fully in a way that honors them.” She asked, “How do you make the people that you’re writing about?”
Fragoza said, “I usually hear a pretty clear voice.” She elaborated, “A lot of the voices that appeal to me are coming from a place that—perhaps there is tenderness; there is wanting to share something with someone that is coming from a vulnerable place. I want to bring that forward.”•
If you’d like to read another story by Fragoza over the holidays, read “Larry’s Biggest Mistake,” published in Alta Journal in 2021. Join us on January 18 at 5 p.m., when author D. J. Waldie will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Lawrence Weschler to discuss Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
Unfortunately, Holy Land has fallen out of print. Please buy the book from Alibris or a local used bookstore of your choice.
