Beginning Middle End: Valeria Luiselli by Gabrielle Trúc Cohen

Beginning Middle End is Valeria Luiselli’s latest book, which tells the story of a mother and daughter on a trip in Sicily, following the collapse of a marriage. As the pair fumble through this new beginning, together trying to rewrite the story of their lives, they turn to other stories for comfort: stories of grandmothers, of Greek and Roman myths, of winds and volcanic rumbles. 

Beginning Middle End is a novel that began while in the process of writing a different novel. It is a novel deeply invested in the observation of change, of time, of movement. It is a novel that was constructed from, in Valeria’s words, “deep listening” and attention to sound. 

She says, “Sound inserts us in time like nothing else. You can’t scroll, you can’t fast forward. We can’t consume sound with the velocity we do images. It’s like an antidote to the velocity of our times. You just have to sit and listen and be deeply lodged in time, and that was the space from which I was able to write Beginning Middle End.”

As a student in Valeria’s “Politics and Aesthetics of Sound” course at NYU in the spring of 2025, reading this book and speaking with her about it was not just delightful, but revelatory and necessary, to remember the importance of writing and art-making, of listening and listening well. This is a book that centers beauty and care in the face of catastrophe, whether personal, political, or geological.

Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of  Sidewalks; Faces in the Crowd; The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions; and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant” and is the winner of DUBLIN Literary Award, two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages.

Gabrielle Trúc Cohen: How did this book begin for you? What were the seeds? 

Valeria Luiselli: Well, I was about to start doing interviews about the book and I was feeling like I was about to have a final exam that I hadn’t even studied for, didn’t even know what to study. I remembered that throughout the process of writing the book, I had asked myself many times: What is this book about? And every time I asked myself that question, I would come to a dead end. 
So, at some point, I said to myself, that’s not a question that is getting me anywhere. I think the question is: What questions is the book addressing? And every time I asked myself that question it pushed me further. It reminded me where the book’s concerns were, where the seeds of the novel began. The other day, remembering that process, I also decided to go back to early journals before I thought I was writing this novel. 

I keep journals very strictly—I mean, not very strictly—but with writing, I’m always having a journal. The only important constant in the journal is I write the season, the year, and towards the middle, I write the names of the projects that are being thought out. Most or all of the journals have maybe three titles of things I’m thinking about. This novel’s working title—a terrible working title—for a long time was “Maternity Leave.”

I went back to journals from when I was on book tour with Lost Children Archive. That was where I found the seed for Beginning Middle End. More concretely, there were three entries where I thought, this is it, this is really the beginning. One journal from winter/spring, early 2019, read, “Started book tour, here with my daughter. She’s so old, so funny, so brilliant. She carries the map.” I think that was the first thing, where I understood something about a deep change, a movement, about a mother-daughter interaction where, suddenly, the daughter is the one who carries the map. 

We always carry maps during our travels, because we like to sit down on at the table, spread out a map, look at it and decide where we’re going and what we’re going to do, dream about other trips we can take. Another entry from that journal is about I don’t know—I must have been really angry at men in general, because it was sort of a pissed off entry—where I wrote: The next novel I write is a novel without men. I have to write a novel with only women. Or, if there are any men, they are just a kind of afterthought, or aftereffect. (Laughs) 
I don’t know what I was thinking, it wasn’t exactly the case with Beginning Middle End. The novel is centered around a story that processes four generations of women in a family. There are some men, but they’re more on the outskirts of the story. But that’s sort of a less important note. 

The most important note was trying to read the play by Seneca, Trojan Women, to my daughter aloud and being surprised to find out that she was so interested in the images and what was happening in the play. Why were these women in Troy taking off their tunics and showing their breasts? Why were they covering themselves with ash, and why ash? What does that mean, you know? And why are they all talking at the same time? And what is a chorus? 

GC: Why Trojan Women?

VL: It’s just a play that has accompanied me for many years. It was the seed for Echoes from the Borderlands, which also became something different, but the original motivation for that work was: How might, in a territory where the only thing we hear are the voices of men, in reenactments and historical tellings, talking about violence and enactment of violence, what would it be like to have a ghostly chorus of women talking about the violence against their bodies instead? The violence enacted upon their bodies and enacted upon land in this area? The exploitation, extraction, and the rape of land and female bodies. 

I think that image of those Trojan women who are about to be taken by the Greeks, to be sold off as sex slaves, runs so contemporary and so true to me in the context of the violence in Mexico—in the violence across the borders and in the disappearances of women that began with Juarez in the 90s, and continues to this day. Somehow it was just that moment of reading out loud with my daughter and understanding that I was able to start a different conversation, inter-generationally, that sprung me toward writing the novel. 

GC: So much of the book’s magic feels due to the intergenerational quality of it. There’s a kind of chorus present in the structure of the three women—the mother, daughter, the grandmother. What was your approach to structure and balance to create that feeling of a chorus? 

VL: I think I slowly found my way there. As I advanced in the novel and, to use a metaphor akin to the novel, dug deeper into the layers of histories and stories, I realized that the narrator couldn’t be the only one bearing witness—even if she’s carrying the story towards us as readers, it couldn’t all happen within her experience and mind. 

I really had to dig deeper to imagine what the stories had been like before her, the stories not of where her lineage began—because that lineage goes much further back—but maybe the lineage that begins with a departure, or with any migration. If we spread the novel out chronologically, the stories referenced of course are much older, going back to Hesiod’s writing in 750 BC. But in terms of the presences of the novel, the story really begins in the dawn of the 20th century with a great migration, and then spreads up to our days—a maybe 100 year lapse of time, of great departures and arrivals, and the somewhat circularity of them. The novel’s first departure is from Catania towards the Americas. But in today’s world, in the Americas, things seem to be falling apart. 

The daughter and mother are somehow back on the island, and the island, at the same time, is also now falling apart. Europe is in a climate catastrophe. And mother and daughter are about to depart towards the next shore, which might be North Africa—or at least in the daughter’s imagination it is. I guess the novel is a story of three or four departures really. 

GC: Or maybe many, many more departures…

VL: Many, many more departures.

GC: Why is the question of departures and arrivals so important to you as a writer? 

VL: I think that all great stories are stories of departures. It’s the threshold of beginnings and endings—the departure. 

There’s very little known about the language of the Phoenicians because it was all destroyed, but the other day I learned there’s a Phoenician word meaning both to “set sail out to sea” and to “grasp a new idea”. What a beautiful thing! Imagine what kind of people we could become. That is the kind of linguistic and semantic universe they inhabited. 

GC: You saying that also makes me think how linguistics and language operate in the novel, which is so pleasurable. There’s so much conversation around the origins of language, a sense of definitions being made and constantly re-made. I know you and have spoken with you a lot about this, but have you always thought about language in this way? How does that inform your writing practice?

VL: I cannot think of the world in a different way. Maybe because I was raised across languages and always felt foreign in them. I’ve also always been very interested in the origin of words and every time I’ve come to the origin of a word, it has been a revelation about the world. In the origin of words are enormous revelations, and yes, they are like maps for me. Maps and origins are the two ways I best navigate the world with my imagination. Nothing makes me more passionate, I think, than discovering. This is how I begin. 

Here’s a notebook for a course I just gave. I was very organized this time writing everything only by hand that I would teach. This is how it begins—with the origin of a word: Enthusiasmus, which comes from the Greek entheos, en- meaning “in” and theos meaning “God”. So, to experience enthusiasm is “to be inhabited by God”. (showing notebook)

GC: How amazing.

VL: Isn’t it amazing? And when you think about it, of course that’s what it is. Enthusiasm is this feeling of… something greater, something inhabiting you, right, and you’re possessed by it, you’re possessed by a God. And there’s also a false etymology, which I love, too: It’s possible, not impossible, that the other part of the word, seismos, comes from “seismic”, or “earthquake”, so to be inhabited by a divinity is like an inner earthquake. 

GC: Which is fitting for the presence of the volcano eruption in the novel. I felt also that there’s a constant feeling of the possibility of some kind of natural disaster, which then is maybe mirrored for the characters. 

VL: Well, I don’t know about mirroring; it doesn’t quite mirror their experience, but I think natural disaster is a low hum that accompanies their entire journey—the imminent threat of disaster, the rumble, which is also underground. You know, the volcanic rumbles and small tectonic shifts, that’s all there throughout the novel. It leads the course of their experience without them knowing it, until they know. 

That’s one of the things that fascinates me most about the writings of the pre-Socratics. We often think about the pre-Socratics as some of the first minds and eyes and ears that documented the world in writing, even though of course they were not the first. There was writing before them, and even of them, we have very fragmented bits and pieces, which made it all the way to us, and so the ones before them were even harder to piece together. Everything is so fragmented. But let’s say the pre-Socratics are not the beginning, but near the beginning, where observation of nature began. And their observation of nature wasn’t infused with theological thinking, but just observation. 

They were in front of a great unknown world, an un-described world. So when the ancients, for example, saw volcanoes, they actually never called them volcanoes. They were just mountains that did weird shit. And it was so much later, in the year 1,100, that the word ‘volcano’ appears from the first time. In every narrative—in the Aeneid, which is fiction but still an observation of nature, written a few years before the turn of the millennium, from the before and after BC, and certainly, in Pliny who documents Vesuvius exploding, he never says “the volcano”. He says, “and suddenly the mountain had this huge cloud in the shape of a pine tree.” And reading, you're like, what is that? But he’s documenting a mountain. 

I feel that we, in this moment, can learn so much from that kind of observation because we are also in front of an absolutely unknown world. Our feeling of time—it’s one that I think all of us, or most of us, share. We can sense that we are in a civilizational end, and in the beginning of something very unknown, and very new to us. I think we certainly are, and I think that understanding the way that those early writers observed, and then carrying it with us, translating it to our days—it’s an exercise we have to do. 

We can’t observe what’s happening around us if we don’t remember how these kinds of enormous changes can be observed. 

GC: Change, or the observation of change, feels at the heart of this book. There’s also a close attention on records, or the absence of records, and many ruins in this book—both literal and psychological. I’m curious about how the novel thinks about record-keeping and history, and about what is possible, or impossible, to know about the past?

VL: Well, I like to write about what I don’t know. That is what ignites enthusiasm in me. It is what possesses me, the unknown. It possesses me for enough time to sustain the writing of a novel. I could not be writing about something that I already know for six years. But actually, really, none of us all of us, I mean none of us really know anything. (laughs) 

So really it’s more important to understand what the questions are, and how one question leads to another. And this deeper and deeper layering of the past, or of archives, or the archipelago of points of observation that one decides to build. This novel is very much constructed in that way. 

I don’t know much about volcanology, or archaeology, or geology. I read from all of those disciplines in order to build this novel, and I know a fragment more about those subjects than I did when I started. 

But thanks to that process, the seeds of curiosity which began with those subjects are now deeply sowed in me, and deeply planted in me, and I feel that I’m ready for the next ten years of my life to explore all of those things more deeply. Getting to know and understand volcanoes and winds better. I only started exploring them in this novel, these things I wanted to excavate in time. And when I say excavate, I mean finding other accounts of those things I’m curious about. Okay, so winds. How the hell do winds work on these islands? What did the ancients say about winds? How did the Romans write about them? How did the Greeks? Where did the name for winds come from? How did people in their everyday lives on the islands feel about winds? 

GC:There are so many kinds of losses that the characters are grappling with in this book—personal, relational, ecological. And you said previously that, as a culture, we can sense that we are on the precipice of an unknown world. One of the questions I felt the book was asking was: What do we do when faced with the apocalypse or disaster? Was that a question you had in mind? Did writing the book change or illuminate something new for you around it? 

VL: You just talked about disaster. 

Another etymology I love, which I learned only this morning from a student studying at NYU in the Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement program. She told me a literature teacher of hers in Mexico had blown her mind when she revealed the etymology of disaster: Disaster is the opposite of astros, the planets. When ships lost their alignment to the planets, because they were following stars to navigate, disaster came upon them. Being unaligned to the shape of the skies above us—that is disaster. It’s being lost in space and time, right? 

I think we are in age of disaster. We are lost in space and time. We don’t know what time feels like anymore. I feel a simultaneous dread of the natural world and space because of what can come with it, the unknowns of catastrophe. Yet, simultaneously, I think there has never been so much worry and care as there is for the natural world as there is now. Growing up in the 80s, people were much less concerned about the natural world, it was beginning, but I feel that there is a lot more care now. That is very moving and gives me hope—we have never cared so much about our living space, our planet. Some of us at least. A very few destroy things. 

It’s a political position to decide we will remain optimistic and hopeful, because the opposite lets us off the hook. If there’s no hope in the face of the apocalyptic and in the face of catastrophe, there’s really nothing left for us to do except kind of sleepwalk through our life. To misalign ourselves and let disaster just take us. But I think deciding to care, and care comes in many different ways—it’s not necessarily jumping on the Greenpeace boat, although that would be amazing. 

Care is also creating spaces for beauty, and thought, and deep reading and thinking. Slowly. Classrooms have also become a much more significant space for me for in the apocalyptic time, to be with students. Making music, making films, making art. All of this is a form of care. It doesn’t solve things, it doesn’t solve the ultimate anything, but it does give continuity, in the fabric between human beings. Of conversation and of thought and of feeling. It’s the only thing that holds and binds us in the end. I don’t think that any of this is futile.

GC: That’s so inspiring.

VL: I mean really, it’s not futile. It’s an important decision to make and upkeep. What else? 

GC: I thought the ending of the book certainly left us with that feeling of hopefulness, too. Can you talk about how you approached the ending? 

VL: Like the Phoenicians, they leave. They sail. It’s the grasping of a new idea. At the book’s end is an act of threading and of care—the adolescent child hands something back to the grandmother. And the grandmother can spin it back to them somehow. To translate the multigenerational story, spinning and threading around itself.  

Plot in Spanish is “trama”, related to weaving. And, I never quite understood this because the process of weaving is quite complicated, but there is a trama, and an entre-trama, and when you weave you have things going horizontally and you have things going vertically. The trama is one and the entre-trama is the other. When you speak about storytelling in Spanish, you have to speak metaphorically, you speak in metaphorical terms about weaving and threading. 

GC: It reminds me of the section in the book where the daughter suggests that maybe time is actually being experienced forward, rather than backward. I don't want to give away too much about that moment, but I loved it. 

VL: That’s a beautiful connection you’re making, I wouldn’t have seen it, but you’re right— because the mother, in the more traditional writerly way, thinks that we can only really make sense of history and stories in hindsight. And the daughter is like, no, it’s actually the other way around. You have to read forward, towards things. It’s the way that the daughter conceives of her own storytelling, instead of the grain of her mother’s storytelling. She is always waiting for the next sign… I don’t want to give away, so I won’t say more than that.

GC: The daughter is always following signs! Why do think that is? 

VL: Why is the daughter always following signs? Hm, I think when one is writing deeply, everything becomes engulfed of that fiction, and therefore the things that appear, they appear as signs or signposts along the way that confirm somehow, or re-affirm, the direction the fiction is moving. It sounds very esoteric what I’m saying, and if not esoteric than psychotic. (Laughs)

There is something slightly alternate in the reality, in the process of fiction-weaving. Everything feels like it’s part of what you’re weaving. Things appear strangely. 

I’m trying to think of an example to make this less esoteric. Yeah, for example, for Proteus: I don’t remember honestly when exactly I decided he was going to be a mythological figure within the novel, but at some point I decided. I must have come across something—I was reading so much mythology in those years that I must have come across him and thought, wow, what a wonderful god. A god who is not only able to tell the future, but also the past, but also doesn’t want to tell you anything. What a wonderful kind of creature. Once I came across Proteus, he just started appearing everywhere. 

I saw him everywhere. These weird things, like I reread a page of a book I had read three years prior, I was reading John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez, when I was doing research for Echoes from the Borderlands. Already there, in the book, I had underlined something about Proteus. I had read this book then, and years and years later when I was writing the novel, I was writing about Proteus. I was like, Oh my god, I read this three years ago! I didn’t even realize I was reading about Proteus. The other name for Proteus is the Old Man of the Sea.

Here’s the line from the book: “When the fishermen find the old man rising in the pathways of their boats, they may be experiencing a reality of past and present. This might not be a hallucination, in fact it is little likely that it is. The interrelations are too delicate and too complicated. Tidal effects are mysterious and dark in the soul and it may be well be noted that even today the effects of tides are strong.” 

Later, he talks about the old man of the sea: “He might well be a myth, except that too many people have seen him. There is some quality in man that makes him people the ocean monsters and one wonders whether they are or they are not.” 

And then I realized, I was teaching Alice Oswald’s, Dart. And Dart ends with Proteus!

GC: Oh my god, you’re right, it totally does. 

VL: The last thing mentioned in Dart is Proteus! That’s what I mean, something very strange in the behavior of the threads of fiction and threads of reality. When you’re deep in the process of writing something, reality is rearranged in such a way that it insists, presses into the clay of fiction, wants to impress itself and rearrange itself. And so the daughter in the book is very much that force. Her psychological, almost mystical openness, to the world being rearranged through the powers of fiction. The way that fiction rearranges reality. She sees ahead because she’s thinking with the threads of fiction-making. She reads the signs of the boat, the toothbrush. She doesn’t see them as objects without sense. She sees them as a constellation of meaning. 

GC: It makes me think, too, about how so much of the book seems to be about listening better—to signs, to each other. 

VL: Oof, yeah, I mean we talked for six months about this. You can certainly go back to your notes from class. (Laughs) 

One of the biggest changes in my personal life that informs this book profoundly is the way that sound became part of my writing process. It came into my life first through fiction, through writing about sound recordings in Lost Children Archive, where my work with sound was purely fiction and theoretical. My characters did that but I had never recorded a single thing. 
I had used sound back and forth during The Story of My Teeth, but it was just some audio notes passed back and forth between a group of factory workers and myself. I never explored it as a medium for fiction writing. As I was telling you earlier, I write about what I don’t know and am curious about. I wanted to know more about sound. I became curious about just doing what my characters did. What is it to record soundscapes? What does one look for, hear for? 

Those curiosities and concerns became concrete when I met two people along the way in life, Ricardo Giraldo and Leo Heiblum, who then became the small collective that we formed for Echoes from the Borderlands. Together we traveled the U.S.-Mexico borderlands for five years, recording this 24 hour soundscape. We didn’t travel this year because we don’t have money, but we will again, hopefully. Throughout all those years, I was also writing this novel, and rethinking completely the way I wrote, about how I paid attention, the pace of things. 

Sound inserts us in time like nothing else. You can’t scroll, you can’t fast forward. We can’t consume sound with the velocity we do images. It’s like an antidote to the velocity of our times. You just have to sit and listen and be deeply lodged in time, and that was the space from which I was able to write Beginning Middle End. 

Sound is present in this novel, but more as the pace at which it is written and read. It’s more a level of attention. It’s not a novel where the characters are recording sound, but a novel written from a space of deep listening. I’m now experimenting with sound in the sonic translation version of this novel. I’ve been working on it since 2019. I work with my current partner who is a sound engineer, and my collaborator from Echoes, Ricardo. They are incredible composers. We went and recorded volcanic exhalations, underwater currents, all the winds, the Levante, and they are helping me translate the text into its sonic version with these sounds.


GC: So the book will include these recordings?


VL: Yes. The audiobook will still be narrative. I’ll read the book. But it will be accompanied and threaded together with all of these sounds, too.