“This is What I Survived:” A Conversation with Reyna Grande

For Reyna Grande, writing a memoir comes naturally, albeit not easily. Drawing from streams of memory tainted by pain, separation, and trauma, Grande’s powerful yet intimate voice has become one of the most recognizable on the literary landscape. 

Her newest book, Migrant Heart: Essays About Things I Can’t Forget (Atria Books/Primero Sueño Press, 2026), is a memoir in eighteen essays, each a monument to the people, places, and things that haunt her. As with her two bestselling memoirs, The Distance Between Us, and A Dream Called Home, Grande is immediately present on the pages of Migrant Heart, but the structured linear narrative is gone. “Stitching my Mother Tongue,” weaves together the complementing themes of colonized canons, racist systems, and language violence. “The Menopausal Gardener’s Almanac,” uses the hermit crab form, aptly dividing prose into columns reminiscent of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. Employing expansive themes and various forms–ranging from lyric and braided narratives to hermit crab pieces, and even an essay written as a play–Grande’s essays give voice to the complicated world in which she lives, one that still struggles to articulate the far-reaching effects of immigration and dislocation. 

I read Migrant Heart feverishly, pencil in hand, and brought it with me when I met with her on a breezy, sunny morning. I drank a blended coffee as she ate a sandwich, both of us settling into a faux iron table on the patio of a suburban strip mall. When a man approached us to ask for spare change, Grande casually offered him half her sandwich, which he accepted. The simple act illuminated how Grande, multifaceted writer of novels, memoir, and eloquent essays, still remembers being poor, abandoned, invisible, and waiting to be recognized as a person of value.

From this place, we dove into conversation. Our discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

The Rumpus: The subtitle of Migrant Heart is, “Essays About Things I Can’t Forget.” Why is this so significant?

Reyna Grande: After I finished my historical novel, A Ballad of Love and Glory, I thought about what my next project should be. I like to alternate between fiction and CNF, so I was ready to go back to writing a memoir, but I knew it wasn’t going to be like my previous two. It had to be different. In the book I mention Sandra Cisneros’ advice: “Don’t write about the things you remember, write about the things you wish you could forget.” That really resonated with me, maybe because that’s what I’ve always done. I write about the things I can’t forget. When I wrote my other two memoirs, I was able to write in a fuller form and in chronological order, bringing the reader into my life, moment by moment because I remember my early years more clearly than I do these last twenty years of my life. 

Since I got married, I’ve had more joyful moments, but those memories seem to have faded faster because I tend to hold on to the ones that hurt. In my earlier years, my childhood years and adolescence, everything hurt! Even though I was younger, those years are burned into my mind, so I was able to write the other two memoirs more completely, more fully, with a clear beginning, middle, and end. 

With Migrant Heart, I knew it would have to be done in essays because there were more gaps in my memory, but the memories I do have, though fragmented, are very vivid. I just focused more on the themes and topics I wanted to explore, rather than mapping out plot points and a narrative arc. I asked, “What’s the theme and shape of each essay?” 

Rumpus: How did you decide which moments to write about?

Grande: Over the years, I have been asked to contribute essays to anthologies. John Freeman asked me to contribute [to Freeman’s California], which is when I wrote an essay about my mom. I wrote “The Menopausal Gardener’s Almanac” for an anthology on menopause, The Big M. I wrote “Stitching My Mother Tongue” for an anthology called Nepantla Familias. So, I had a few essays already under my belt, and to make a collection, I needed to write new ones. 

I made a list of topics I was curious about. The first essay, “The Queen of Misery,” about my wedding day, explores my inclination towards remembering only what hurts. I often wondered why I struggle to hold on to the joy. Every time I told the story of our wedding, I would talk about the bad things that happened. My husband would say, “Don’t ruin one of the happiest days of my life,” because unlike me, he chose to remember the good parts. I wanted to explore why I dwell on negativity and where that comes from. I also wanted to write about being a young mother, when I didn’t know how to discipline my son. I explored the cycle of violence that runs in my family. My father modeled physical punishment for me when I was growing up, and when I became a mom, I was trying to break the cycle, but it was a struggle. In that essay I explore the harm of chancla culture in the Latinx community. 

The collection took me almost three years to put together. Whenever I finished an essay, I couldn’t jump immediately to the next one. I needed to sit with it for a bit, just to give myself some time to finish processing before moving on.

Rumpus: I love how you use different essay forms.  

Grande: I really wanted to explore, to give myself permission to experiment and have fun with form. I love lyric essays, braided essays. I always admire those writers who can really pull it off, because it could easily be a mess, right? 

Rumpus: But it’s not! I loved  “Horror Story,” which begins with your ophthalmologist diagnosing you with keratoconus, and braids themes of being seen, being a citizen of two countries, dislocation. 

Grande: I decided to take fragments of memory and pull them together using vision as metaphor. My journey with vision loss was one thread, my misshapen corneas, and then I explored distortion, the devil’s mirror from the Snow Queen, the different ways this country is blind to its immigrant community, to our humanity. 

Rumpus: You write, “Perhaps the real story isn’t about blindness at all, but the way that we see—or not to see—each other. The way we see ourselves, or how we are seen.”

Grande: That’s what we immigrants have to deal with: visibility and invisibility. We grapple with that, either being invisible or hyper visible, and there’s a consequence to each. We want to be seen just enough to matter, but not too much to be noticed for the wrong reasons.

Rumpus: I was so touched by “Dictionary of a Father’s Death,” which is written like a glossary. This is the one that made me cry the most, and it’s a hermit crab form, right? 

Grande: Yeah, the entries are in alphabetical order. I wrote the first draft a year ago in February, at a 10-day writer’s retreat in Aurora, New York. I wanted to write about my father’s death, and I was very fortunate to be granted access to his medical records, which were over eight hundred pages. 

I spent a week combing through his records, extracting specific phrases from them to use as prompts. It wasn’t structured quite the way it is now but the medical data was so helpful. 

As soon as I decided to call it “Dictionary of a Father’s Death,” everything fell into place. I selected each word, divided it into syllables, added the pronunciation and whether it’s a noun or a verb or whatever, then I came up with the definitions. The way I used each word told the story of my relationship with my father and how I experienced his death. 

Rumpus: You write, “In A Christmas Card Sent to Mexico in 1983, you wrote the six words that would define my memory of you: Your father who does not forget you. It was a promise that crossed a border two years before you did. You kept your promise then and I will keep mine now.”  With remembering being both a blessing and a curse, is this why the form worked? 

Grande: Oh, yes! The year when my father was dying was very fragmented. I don’t remember everything that unfolded throughout the months. I only remember snippets. This is why the dictionary format worked. Also, grief is fragmented and hard to understand. I was trying to come up with definitions to help me cope with my grief.  

Rumpus: These flashes of memory make compelling reading. You explore deep memories and longings in “In Search of the Hydra House” as you make your way to a destination. 

Grande: That essay is the oldest [in the book]. I published an earlier version of it in 2012, in Count On Me: Tales of Sisterhoods and Fierce Friendships. The original started and ended differently but the middle stayed the same–where I write about my teacher, Diana Savas, who changed my life. The new version of the essay was renamed “In Search of the Hydra House” because it opens and ends with me in Greece. In 2024,  Diana and I celebrated thirty years of our friendship and we went to Greece to celebrate. In the essay, I write that I met Diana when I was 18 years old, and she was the first teacher who encouraged me to become a writer. She introduced me to Sandra Cisneros’ classic book, The House on Mango Street, which inspired my writing. The essay starts with us on our way to Hydra, the same island where Sandra finished writing Mango Street. Being there was a full circle moment for Diana and me.

Rumpus: “Into the Borderlands” explores another journey, but this one with a documentary film crew traveling into the Sonoran Desert. There’s something in there that is absorbing, from the “collective we” point of view, addressing the nation’s political climate right now, towards immigrants. You have an outsider’s perspective, and an insider’s perspective, which is so important.

Grande: I think part of the work of going to the border to do that project was not only to bear witness to what was going on there, but also to revisit a place that I myself crossed as a child. I’m both a witness to other border crossers and a border crosser myself, which gives me the perspective that I have, like being able to look at the issue from the inside and the outside. I wanted to be there at the border to document what was going on. 

I find it really interesting that so many of the humanitarian groups there are mostly older white retirees, putting themselves at risk trying to do a service to these human beings who oftentimes are so dehumanized. They are not just bringing food, water, and medical supplies to the asylum seekers and refugees, but they are also keeping an eye on the border patrol and vigilante groups. 

For me, being there and being able to reflect on my own crossing in the 1980’s, and then seeing what these border crossers are going through now, makes me think about how much worse things have gotten since I crossed. We encountered a lot of children when we were filming and I thought of myself as a child crossing that border. There could have been so many different outcomes, right? I could have been like them: I could have died, been detained, disappeared, or separated from my family.

Being there at the border is re-traumatizing. At the same time, it’s also very healing.This is what I survived. I need to honor the fact that I made it and to live my life to the fullest. I need to take advantage of all these opportunities that come my way because there’s so many other people who did not survive, who didn’t make it, who don’t have what I have. It’s a humbling moment,  a reminder to be grateful. It’s also a reminder to use my position of privilege to try to advocate for others. 

Rumpus: You’ve been doing a lot of advocacy work lately. How do you normally exercise self-care? 

Grande: There are many things that I enjoy. My garden, although it’s quite a task, is a good way for me to decompress. Yesterday, I was weeding because sometimes when I’m preoccupied with stuff, and I feel some anxiety, I need to grab a bucket and go pull weeds. I am getting some sun, my vitamin D. I’m thinking while I’m doing it, processing my emotions, and as I put the garden in order I am also putting my thoughts in order. After I’m done weeding, the area looks cleaner, and I feel more in control, I guess. 

I also think a lot about writing when I’m weeding. There’s this area where I planted poppies, and as they were coming out after the rains, there were weeds mixed in with the poppies, but the plants looked so similar, I couldn’t tell which one was the poppy, and which one was the weed. I had to leave everything until they grew a little more, and now I could tell the difference. As I was pulling out the weeds, trying not to disturb my poppies, I was thinking, “This is kind of like revision.” Sometimes people try to revise too early, and then you end up cutting things that actually might have been good, that might have bloomed into something beautiful.

Rumpus: Great analogy! Do you struggle with edits? Do you write on a computer, or by hand? 

Grande: I write at a computer. I don’t really like writing by hand because my handwriting is quite messy, and I don’t like crossing out stuff. I like the page to be clean and organized. I like the computer because I’m able to copy and paste and move this, move that. I do need to get better at keeping track of the drafts because I’m always revising the same document. I need to keep my drafts separate so I can see how the manuscript changes. My daughter is good at that. Every time she starts revising, she’ll create a new file for each draft. 

Rumpus: You mention your daughter’s writing in, “The Storyteller’s Daughter,” which I loved. 

Grande: Yes, and I added one of her essays! As I was working on the final proofs, I found out that she had written an essay about me for her college application. It was so sweet, it made me cry, and I asked her if we could add it to my book. She agreed and luckily, we were able to fit it into the book without messing up the formatted pages. When I did the audiobook, Eva came in and recorded her essay. 

Rumpus: What a great addition! Your essays do that. They alternate light-hearted and serious themes. It shows the paradox of life. Do you have a favorite essay among these? 

Grande: I like “Horror Story” and “The Menopausal Gardener’s Almanac,” for different reasons. When I was asked to contribute to The Big M, an anthology about menopause, at first I was shocked that I am now old enough to be asked to contribute an essay about menopause. Once I got over my shock, the idea came to me–to write about what I’ve learned from gardening about motherhood, aging, menopause, sexuality, intimacy, that kind of stuff. I even wrote about my garden slugs! 

Rumpus: That made me laugh out loud! You write, “I buy a case of Mexican beer at Costco. If Mexican beer can conquer the U.S. market, maybe it can drown a few slugs.” I thought that was so cool! This was a fun essay to read.

Grande: I had fun writing it. I formatted it in columns since I was calling it an almanac, like the Old Farmer’s Almanac, but not only is it a braided essay, it is also a triptych. 

When I started writing “Horror Story,” I was afraid it was going to be a mess, since it has several strands. I worked on that essay for two years, constantly tweaking it, moving sections around, deleting some, really trying to get it right. I feel satisfied with it now, confident that I put in the work. I feel each strand of the braid really comes together to form a whole, and the themes of blindness and sight come through really well.