Interview with Ana Menéndez

Ana Menéndez has written five books of fiction: In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, Loving Che, The Last War, Adios, Happy Homeland!, and most recently, The Apartment. Each tell stories of complex relationships to truth—whether that be truths of ancestry, infidelity, belonging, memory, exile, or witnessing. Menéndez imbues much of her work with the search (and impossibility) for recovery. As a child of Cuban migrants/exiles herself, Ana has said that “bittersweet nostalgia” is an obsession that runs through most of her writing—“the sense that the past is sweet and wonderful to wallow in precisely because it cannot be recovered.”[1] This speaks to her incisive ability to make the particular and the common sit with each other, not against each other, but in deep company. Which one of us has not yearned for a yesterday that felt maybe just a bit too sweet? And yet the thread that ties us together comes from her precise particularization of moments in time that each of her characters experience.

This interview centralizes Menéndez’s most recent novel, The Apartment. The book marks her sustained mediation on place—in this case a Miami Beach apartment—charting the land’s/space’s transformation alongside the city’s shifting sociocultural, demographic, and class compositions. The story spans across decades of time and turmoil, moving through Indigenous relationships to place, the building’s construction during WWII, and the decades of migrations—Cuban and others. Finally, it centers community making—its difficulties, its fragility, its tenderness, and its radical possibilities for keeping each other alive. I find that people and their need for each other are always at the heart of Menéndez’s work; this book, more than her others, interweaves environment and place as a critical artery.

Daimys Garcia: So, can you tell us a little bit about The Apartment?

Ana Menéndez: The Apartment is a novel that spans the years 1942 to 2012—although there is a prologue that takes place 500 or so years before that—and it takes place in a single apartment, 2B, in the Helena apartment building. Each chapter is a different inhabitant of the apartment, dealing with their own form of displacement, of loneliness, and alienation.

DG: How do questions of the environment play into the text?

AM: It became important to me, probably more important than some of the other books that I've written before, to address the changes to the natural environment that I had witnessed in my time living in Miami Beach. The first time living in Miami Beach was 19 . . . well, I moved to Hollywood Beach, which kind of counts . . .

[laughter]

AM: Don’t let them hear me say that. [laughter]

DG: Yeah, I was going to say I don't know if Miamians would be okay with that. [laughter]

AM: It’s not Miami, but you know, coastal community, South Florida.

DG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely!

AM: I moved in 1992, something like that—’92, ’93? No, ’92—and then down to the Mid Beach in ’93 and then South of 5th street in ’94. And then I went off, you know, I kept moving around and then I went off to California, I came back and I lived in South Beach proper for a couple of years, I had an apartment there. So, over the years I saw changes and especially since I would live there for a time and then leave and then come back—it's like when you come back, you see your parents even older than if you had just stayed and watched the slow progress. I remember I came back after my son was born; he was baby so it must have been 2012, 2013. We rented an apartment near Lincoln Road, and I went out to see friends in the Grove. When I came back, I could not get into the parking lot that was across the street from this building. That was the first time that had ever happened to me in the beach. I lived through Andrew, on the coast; I was in Hollywood then—it was a fast-moving storm, so yes there was no flooding, but still . . .

DG: Yea . . .

AM: . . . It was a hurricane.

DG: It was catastrophic.

AM: Right, and there was no flooding then. I returned to find—it was a small downpour, I mean, not small, it was a summer sort of maybe rain, but it didn't last for a long time—and I could not drive into the parking lot, it was that flooded; I had a mini convertible at the time, and I just could not drive in there. It’s the first time that I thought, “Oh, we keep talking about climate change, but it’s already here. It’s not something that's coming, it’s here.” Then, you know, I went back to the Netherlands, came back, and it was even worse—to the point where I was seeing things that I had never seen before and could not have imagined, such as blue-sky flooding; I forget, there’s a term for it, but you know, clear sky flooding where no rain, blue skies, but a full moon. And all of a sudden, the waters just coming up through the drains and the streets are flooded and it hasn’t rained.

DG: It’s kind of a terrifying image.

AM: It's bizarre. And, you know, we were talking the other day about the octopus . . .

DG: In the grates!

AM: Yeah, you know, octopus in the grates.

DG: Things nightmares are made of . . .  

AM: Yea! You know, one time I was passing by the park, by my house, and I looked down into one of the grates and there’s a crab hanging on to the grates as if for dear life. So, you start to notice these things and you realize what they are . . . you know, I did this workshop on paying attention and. . . what are we as writers? We’re chroniclers of the inner environment, but also of the outer environment and of the of the interaction of the two. It became clear to me that if I’m going to write a novel (as this ended up becoming) of the passage of time in South Beach, you cannot ignore this thing that I had noticed, which is the way that the climate was most definitely changing within a relatively small amount of time, really. This novel’s not about it, so I didn’t feel like I needed to hammer it all the time, but enough so that it became something real in the book.

DG: I think part what is quite interesting about the text is the way that people are shifting and the ideas of displacement and migration, war and turmoil, sadness, despair. . . and hope—there is community in there [laughter] there’s also that part . . .

AM: We get to that. [laughter]

DG: But is in some ways paralleling that relationship to the earth. Because it starts with this Indigenous character who is thinking about the land and even . . . I was struck yesterday during your talk when you read the line that the avocado and the coconut had come to stay. In fact, we think about coconuts and avocados as part of the Miami landscape, but we don’t think about the fact that they’re actually not an indigenous species, they come from other places . . .

AM: Exactly, yea.

DG: And already those kinds of changes mirror . . . the energy of the earth mirrors the energy of the people. It becomes a stark way to map the interior/exterior relationship there. From that, I wanted to ask about—we have the outside environment and climate. That’s a big part of it, but also there’s the environment we make—our environment that we live in, like the building. The apartment is a main character in the text, and it has consciousness in a particular way. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and how you consider that part of the environment?

AM: Yeah, absolutely. You see architects and urban developers, urban designers, talking about the built environment, and that’s certainly a huge part of the environment we have. We tend to think . . . it’s almost like the disconnect between mind and body, the built environment and the natural environment, as if they’re separate, and in fact it is of a whole—it’s one piece. The “natural environment” (trees, you know, organic environments) has a bearing on the built environment, and obviously vice versa. We are all contributing to the life of each other and in Miami, this is especially true because you have the humidity, the sea—it’s eroding the buildings, it’s acting upon the buildings, and of course the buildings are acting upon the earth. That’s the whole point of the book in a lot of ways, and with that prologue—before there was nothing there and then it becomes a land of permanent occupation. You have these invasive species really, which is avocado and coconut palm, which everybody associates with Miami.

DG: And Europeans, right? People, plants, all kinds of things.

AM: Yea, all kinds of things that are not indigenous to this land and have altered it—and, people have been altered by it. It works . . . there’s a real dynamic interaction between these two things. So, the built environment of this novel is obviously the apartment, and the invasive species within that apartment building: which are the mice and the people, and how they coexist or not, and how they care for one another or not. That became an important aspect as well. And then there’s the creaking floorboards—again, because the environment is acting on this wood, it’s softening it, it’s changing its structure.

DG: Creating a depression.

AM: Exactly. All of that is of a piece. They’re not, to my mind, separate things. When you're writing a novel, it’s what space are you going to create for your characters to exist in—that becomes important as well.

DG: The mice are a particularly interesting case because in some ways mice are things that people want to get rid of, they don’t belong but by the end of the story, they are the thing that . . . they create a kind of responsibility, in the way that pets do, they create a responsibility where someone says, “Hey, I have to check on them, I have to feed them, I have to make sure they’re okay,” and so actually allows, or helps someone have some sort of purpose. I thought that transition was impactful. Can you talk a little bit about how. . . did you know that that’s where you wanted to end up? Or did that just happen? Or where the mice extra?

AM: No, I’ve always wanted to write about these mice because . . . I gave this workshop this morning, “From Anecdote to Story,” about how we turn our personal anecdotes into story, or how we use them in story, and this is another example; this book is full of anecdotes that I have fictionalized and turned into story.

[laughter]

AM: But that comes from when I was living in New Delhi. They weren’t mice, they were rats. It was a big building, new building. We were on the top floor and I kind of knew we had rats; we could kind of hear them and night banging around in the pots. But I was like, you know . . .

DG & AM: Out of sight . . .

[laughter]

AM: Until one day that I walked into the kitchen early and there’s a huge rat trying to escape through the exhaust fan, desperately—you know, terrified of you . . .

DG: Goodness, and you terrified of it.

AM: And you terrified of it. And we had a live-in housekeeper—in India you have live-in housekeepers—and she was from Tibet. She was Buddhist, and her name was Dhundup. I finally went to Dhundup and I said, “We have to get rid of this rat.” At that point it was still one rat in my mind.

[laughter]

AM: Naïve. . . so, we have to get rid of this rat. They’re disease vectors, and I just. . . we cannot. . .  And at this point we’re in a big dilemma because she’s Buddhist, they can’t kill these animals. So we didn’t do anything for a while, then we saw the rat again and it’s like, “Listen, we’ve got to do something, help me out here.” So, she showed up one day with a bunch of handmade humane rat traps and they were huge—which first of all, I thought, do they need to be that big?—and it was more than one; it was about five or six of these traps. And I thought, “Well, it’s just one rat, right?” So, she set them up in the big the kitchen, set them up along the counter with whatever food she put in there—I don't remember what it was—and the next morning when I came in to breakfast, every cage was full and Dhundup was feeding them pieces of lettuce through the grates.

DG: Wow. Sweet, but also kind of horrifying.

AM: Horrifying, tender, surreal. And in the way of horrifying, tender, surreal stories, it’s stayed with me forever as an anecdote. I would tell it often—“You'll never guess what happened to me in India”—it’s one of those stories. My friends know when I start stories ‘when I lived in India’ there’s going to be some fabulous thing. So, I’ve carried this story, this was in 1997 when this happens, so I’ve carried this story for a long time. But it acquired, in the way of the objective correlative, T.S. Eliot’s objective correlative, in my own life and in my own telling it acquired more meaning to me. It’s the way that we care for terrifying things that are, even so, vulnerable; and even so vulnerable to our wrath and to our will; and how do we care for them? And do we care for them? And why do we care for them? To me it was an interesting way to look at life and to look at our place in the environment because we are also . . . We are the ultimate invasive species and we are also members of an affected, and affecting the environment that we move in. So, I knew that I wanted to use that in something that I wrote and then it became, when I sat down to write the Lana section, it was like, “Okay, this is it.” And that was there from the beginning that somebody was going to be tending to mice . . . then the thing about keeping them as pets—this is another anecdote: my ex-husband’s brother bought a house in Arlington and when they took control of it, they had all these mice. He set up humane traps. They’re big animal lovers, and they were white mice. That’s how I know that there’s this phenomenon of white mice because they escaped from labs, so some places have white mice—that’s why I made these mice white mice. He kept them as pets. So, I kind of combined all these things that happened—I have this weird connection with rats. I have other stories of rats.

DG: I was going to say, I'm impressed at how many mice and rat stories you have!

AM: Oh, I wrote an essay for New Letters on my rat thing.

[laughter]

AM: So, it’s there and it’s all these different rats. When I was a kid I had a little stuffed rat—I still have it, I can send you a picture—but I still have this little stuffed rat toy that I loved, and I carried with me everywhere. I left it at Woolworths one day, I just cried and cried and cried and my parents went back and there it was. I still have this . . .  this constant presence of rats. And there’s been more. It was important to me. It’s an objective correlative in my own life. I just found a way to incorporate it.

DG: It’s telling to me of the way that the book is a reflection—you talked about this yesterday in your talk—but a reflection of that deep, sustained attention. Because I think there’s one way to pay attention, which is you sit and pay attention in the moment and ask, “Okay, what’s happening?” But it’s another thing to develop a capacity for sustained attention: to pay attention consistently and constantly. And that’s hard to do, especially in a world where, as you said earlier, the climate is changing. I think your book is a testament to how the particularity of attention becomes larger and raises questions of how to be in the world. Which maybe I’m not saying anything, but you know what I mean.

AM: No, no, I appreciate it. I appreciate that you’ve read it that way because that’s totally the way that I was working towards. This idea of sustained attention is very important to me just philosophically. Of noticing ways of being and noticing what’s happening over time and how things are changing. Absolutely.

[1] Interview Ari Shapiro for NPR: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/28/1184894608/author-ana-menendez-explores-stories-a-single-location-could-tell-in-the-apartme

Ana Menéndez is an associate professor of English at Florida International University (FIU). Before joining FIU, she taught creative writing at Maastricht University in The Netherlands. A former journalist, columnist, and freelance photographer, she has also lived in New Delhi, Istanbul, and Cairo, where she was a 2008-09 Fulbright Scholar. She has published five books of fiction, most recently The Apartment.

Daimys Ester García is a writer, artist, and educator from Miami. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature at SUNY Binghamton and is currently an assistant professor in English at the College of Wooster. Her work is at the intersections of Latinx literatures & studies, Native literatures & studies, women of color feminisms, and decolonial praxis with a focus on coalitional politic. Her essays have been published in Convivial Thinking, and her poetry has been published in The Maynard and Chicana/Latina Studies.

Published April 15 2025