Podcasts
Award-Winning Novelist Elena Vasquez on Maps, Memory, and Family Secrets
National Book Award winner discusses the eight-year journey of writing her bestselling debut novel inspired by Cold War intelligence work and personal family history.
This week's episode of the Pioneer Valley Gazette podcast features an extended interview with novelist Elena Vasquez, whose debut novel The Cartographer's Daughter won the National Book Award for Fiction and has spent 34 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel, set across three decades and two continents, follows a woman uncovering the hidden history of her mother's work as a cartographer for a Cold War-era intelligence agency. Vasquez discusses the eight-year research and writing process, reveals which characters were inspired by real people, and reads a passage from the climactic scene that appears in Chapter 16.
The conversation ranges across Vasquez's influences, including the work of novelists Gabriel García Márquez and Marilynne Robinson, her decision to set portions of the narrative in Argentina during the military dictatorship, and the emotional toll of researching state surveillance and family secrets. "I wanted to write a novel where maps were not just geographical tools but psychological territory," Vasquez explains. "Mapping requires choices about what to include and what to leave out, what deserves attention and what gets erased. That's exactly what we do when we construct family narratives." She discusses how her own family's immigration history influenced the novel's exploration of displacement, borders, and belonging.
On Writing and Obsession
"I don't know if I'm a writer who happens to be obsessive, or an obsessive person who writes," Vasquez says during the interview. "But this particular story consumed me. I had images, fragments, questions that wouldn't let go, and the only way to satisfy them was to write the novel." She describes the process of creating a detailed timeline spanning 1962 to 1995, interviewing cartography historians, researching declassified intelligence documents, and visiting archives in Washington, D.C., Buenos Aires, and London. The novel mentions 47 real historical events, all woven into the fictional narrative so seamlessly that readers frequently ask which parts are true.
Vasquez also discusses the publishing process, including working with her editor over 18 months of revisions, the anxiety of watching early reviews, and the surreal experience of attending literary festivals where strangers discuss her imagined characters as if they were real people. "Someone told me they found my novel on their mother's bookshelf and realized it explained things about their family they'd never understood," Vasquez recalls. "That conversation is why I write. Not for awards or bestseller lists, but for the possibility that a story might illuminate something someone else had been living in darkness."
Listening Details
The episode runs 62 minutes and includes six segments: an introduction to Vasquez's work, the main interview, a reading from Chapter 7, a brief biography of real-world cartographer Barbara Petchenik, discussion of the novel's publication history and critical reception, and closing remarks about Vasquez's work-in-progress on a second novel. The podcast is available through all major streaming platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, as well as on the Pioneer Valley Gazette website at pioneersvalleygazette.com/podcast. New episodes release every Thursday morning. Previous interviews in the podcast series include conversations with journalists, historians, and filmmakers exploring how storytelling shapes our understanding of news and culture.