Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, metro columnist for the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, sports, culture and business.

When Katie Gutierrez was nine years old.

She told her father that she was going to be the world's youngest published author.

It didn't happen as fast, as quickly as hoped, but the wait has been worth it for the Laredo native and San Antonio resident for 2022.

Debut novel, More Than You'll Ever Know, was a bestseller that earned raves from the New York Times.

The Washington Post was selected for the Good Morning America Book Club and was nominated for an Edgar Award in the category of best debut novel.

The book is an exploration of border politics, motherhood, the complexities of marriage, and the secrets that we all keep encased in a murder story involving a woman leading a double life.

On tonight's episode, Gutierrez talks about growing up in South Texas, the painstaking process of writing her book and where she sees her work going from here.

Let's get started.

Katie, thanks so much for being on Texas talk.

Thanks for having me, Gilbert.

Now, I know that when you were nine years old and this is an amazing story to me, you told your dad that you were going to be the world's published author.

And I'm trying to think about what I was what I was thinking about at the age of nine.

I know it was nothing that serious or ambitious.

I mean, where did you get the sort of the confidence and the sense of certainty that this is what you wanted to do at such a young age?

I was always a reader.

My mom really instilled the love of reading in all three of us, my brother and sister and me.

She would read to us every single night and we'd all fight for the place on her lap.

And then when I learned how to read, probably, I'm sure in in kindergarten, it was kind of like the world opened up for me and I was never without a book after that, which is really not an exaggeration.

I'd be walking down the halls of school, reading a book, and I'd be, you know, I'd have my math book open in math with like, you know, my Goosebumps book in front of it.

And then third grade, my teacher consultants in Laredo, she assigned us a project which was to write a story about what you would do if you were a teacher for a day.

And so I wrote that story in the book and illustrated it very halfheartedly.

It was very much more about the story for me.

But from that point forward, it unlocked something for me, and I always wanted to be writing and telling stories, and I was always trying to have my brother and sister have, you know, reading parties and writing parties with me, which they were less than interested in, you know, summer breaks.

I was always in my room with a spiral notebook, you know, writing stories.

I think when I was around nine, I wrote one called Ghost Cat that lives on in Infamy, and my family was about 90 loose leaf pages.

My first kind of attempt at a novel, when you were 15.

I think you actually did write a novel.

I did.

I mean, do you remember what it was about?

I, I do.

It was the premise.

Gosh, it's been a while since I've talked about this.

The premise was questioning how God chooses the people who die every day and what would happen if one day something stopped him from choosing anybody.

And I imagined this sort of ensemble cast who's getting to live one extra day without realizing it.

What would that day entail and what would have kept God from making that list?

That was the premise of that was that said some heavy stuff there for it didn't work.

After you graduate from college, you worked for about six months at the Austin Bureau of People magazine before they shut that down.

And you've talked about the fact that doing journalism, you were really uncomfortable doing interviews, that you basically see yourself as an introvert.

But over the years, as your fiction writing career has taken off, you've also done some great magazine writing, and some of it is involved doing interviews.

Have you gotten more comfortable with that as you've gone on?

I would say that I'm still very nervous leading up to interviews every time, including this one, whichever side of the interview on.

Yeah.

But I think, you know, I've always been very interested in people and curious about people who live different lives than I do.

And so ultimately, I think when I work on stories, you know, for journalism, it becomes you know, it becomes about those people and about those stories.

And then the the sort of puzzle of figuring out how how to tell those stories.

And I take that I take that really seriously to me feels like a big responsibility when people are entrusting you with some aspect of their lives or their stories.

And and I try to do I try to do a good job with it.

Before writing your novel, more than you'll ever know, you wrote an earlier novel, and you were I, I my understanding is that you were in the submission process for that novel when you started working on More than Deliver.

No.

And you got an agent and you sent it to editors, and the book didn't sell.

And I wondered if because that's that's got to be a given all the work that goes into that, that has to be a very tough process.

I'm wondering if it was helpful to you in some way that you were already starting on the next book while that process was happening, And would it have been harder for you psychologically to say, okay, now that it hasn't been accepted, now I've got to start with something else?

I think it was essential for me to get through those first few months.

My agent started out by asking, you know, what kind of communication do you want?

Do you want to hear every time we hear back from an editor or do you want to hear only the good news?

Do you want to hear once a week?

And I said, No, I want to hear everything.

Everything.

I want to know every single thing they're saying about this book.

And it it got to the point where my husband and I would be running errands or I'd be doing something and not thinking about it.

And then my email would time and I'd get the rejection, you know, And it got to a point where it was so demoralizing and so crushing and scary to to think that I've gotten so close and this still might not work out, I think without having this other project to work on, it would have been really easy to become pretty depressed about the whole thing.

But kind of immersing myself in this new world and being excited by it, it made the transition between being on to the mission and hopeful and not being on a mission anymore.

A lot easier, no more than You'll ever know is the story of Laura Rivet Rivera, who is a woman who led a double life, who was married to one man in Laredo, another man in Mexico.

And it's also the story and the murder that that that arises from that from that double life that she's leading.

It's also the story of Cassie Bowman, who's a young true crime blogger who becomes obsessed with the story and wants to find out what happened.

And I was thinking and reading it that, you know, another writer might have just made the entire story about Laura and what she went through and that, you know, that it was a really interesting choice that you made to to to frame it in the way that you did.

Where it's the stories is we're going back and forth basically between Cassie and a lot of his stories.

Why was it important to you that that that the story be told that way?

Yeah, great question.

In 2017, I was starting to think a lot about true crime and the way that we have become obsessed with it as a culture.

And I was particularly interested in the way a true Crime depicts women as victims and specifically, you know, cisgender, straight white women.

If you if you watch true Crime or listen to true crime, you'd be forgiven for thinking these are the only people who ever get, you know, assaulted or murdered.

And I was questioning, you know, my own interest in true crime.

I was questioning this representation of women.

I was wondering if it was accurate or not.

And when I did some research, I found that it was not accurate.

As far as, you know, women being really disproportionately represented as victims at 80% of homicide victims are men.

20% are women.

And then of those 20, once you break it down by ethnicity, you know, black women are killed at 2 to 3 times the rate of white women.

Why do you think that there is this focus always on and on white women as the victims in this?

I think our culture has gravitated around the image of a middle class white woman as as blameless in some ways.

And so she becomes a very sympathetic figure.

And a like almost like a universally sympathetic figure that we might all see ourselves in in some way.

But it's not it's not accurate.

And I think that, you know, when you look at who are who are the victims of violent crime, who are the victims of of homicide, you know, you would be looking at black women, you would be looking at trans women.

You're looking at indigenous women.

And that that opens up a whole other series of questions of, you know, well, why is why is the focus so different and who is packaging these stories and what do they what do they want from us?

And so those were some of the questions I wanted to get into with Cassie, who is a white woman.

And I think she has these good intentions of of of interviewing, lauded not as a victim, but kind of as a perpetrator.

Right.

Somebody who is fairly unapologetic about her role in things.

And and yet, Cassie, as this kind of young true crime writer still has her blindspots that I think she has to contend with throughout the story by going back and forth.

You're going to the 1980s and the lawyer's life.

You're going in more into the present day with Cassie.

It had the effect on me of like creating a sense of the parallels between their lives, the secrets that both of them had and the things that they were both struggling with.

I mean, I'm sure that was something that you that you had in mind when you started working on it.

There divided generationally.

They're about 30 years apart.

They're divided geographically.

Cassie's from Oklahoma and Laura's, of course, from Laredo.

You know, they're divided by their life experiences, by their ethnicities.

But I always saw them as being mirrors for each other in certain ways, being foils for each other.

And I saw them each as as being essential to pointing out the other's blind spots.

So I think I think they both inevitably had to learn from each other for the story to work.

And there had to be that that tension between them.

And I was really interested in exploring how that works between women of different generations.

You know, when they both fundamentally want something opposing each other.

Right?

Like Cassie is wanting the truth out of Laura.

That Laura, for her own reasons, needs to hide.

And what is that?

How does that affect their relationship with each other and eventually with themselves?

One of the things I really liked about the book was that the plot was sort of in a way was a device or a portal that allowed you to really explore all kinds of ideas and historical events.

You're looking at what it's like to live in a border community and the economy of a border town.

You're looking at the recession of the early eighties, the peso devaluation, the big earthquake, the horrifying earthquake in Mexico in the mid-eighties.

You're looking at the challenges of motherhood, you know, keeping a marriage going.

So many different things going on there.

And one of the things that really struck me was that you you have Laura at one point, she's, you know, not wanting to have more kids.

She's talking about how becoming a mother made her basically consume her in a way that the woman was consumed by the mother.

And I think that these are ideas that I think a lot of women feel, but they're probably discouraged by society when it comes to expressing them.

Mm hmm.

You were in the process of becoming a mother for at least part of the writing of the book.

And just how much did you have a connection?

Did you feel obviously, like, you know, you love your kids, but I think people do struggle with these kinds of feelings.

Oh, for sure, yeah.

When I first started writing the book was August of 2017, and that was also the month I found out I was pregnant.

And after a couple of years of dealing with infertility and I had this idea that I had to write the book before the baby was born because I didn't know what life as a writer would look like afterwards.

And that didn't work at all.

The book took so long to write and then edit, and I became a mom twice during that time.

So, you know, I had my daughter in 2018 and then my son in 2020, which was in the middle of the pandemic.

And I found myself going.

I always knew that Laura would be a mom for the ways that it would complicate the story and complicate her as a character.

But these two different periods of becoming a mom, one pre-pandemic, the next one in the pandemic, and really seeing how much our society claims to love mothers and yet, you know, sort of devalues the work at every turn when it comes to paid parental leave, when it kind of set, you know, any kind of universal childcare when it comes to really anything that would make mothers lives easier.

During the pandemic, it was the moms who kind of left the workforce in droves to homeschool their kids.

So I was really internalizing a lot of that struggle.

The combination of there's overwhelming love you feel for your children, the fear you feel in letting them into this world that is unpredictable all and often scary, but also beautiful.

And yet the ways that it that it is consuming, you know, life as a writer and life in general is very different.

Post kids than it was beforehand.

And I think that I think a lot of us do feel consumed by motherhood in many ways at different times.

And so that was something that became really important to me to give voice to in the book.

And I think it became a much stronger thread than I initially anticipated.

I related to the story of of your work on the book because I know that at least part of it was written during that time your daughter, your first child.

And many years ago, in doing my journalism work, I would try to find time to write or work on something during my daughter's naptime, and I found it to be really difficult, really very stressful because you've got such a limited amount of time and and there's always the possibility your child's going to wake up at any moment.

And so it's just and so I wondered I mean, I was kind of amazed that you were able to do that.

And it sounds like for a period of time that was that was really your writing time on this novel.

I mean, how were you able to do that?

I think my daughter was about five months when she started napping.

In the beginning, it was much less predictable and then it grew more so.

But for me, it it really let me figure out how to just sit in the chair and just get into the work instead of procrastinating, Oh, I need another cup of coffee, any snack I need to, you know, let me go down this rabbit hole of research like it taught me how to be, I think, more efficient at slipping into that space, which I ended up really appreciating.

And I think it it also became this really necessary, like a reprieve for me.

You know, the early days of motherhood are so as we're talking about consuming, you know, they're sleepless.

I breastfed both my kids for over a year.

So it's they're on you all the time physically and they're on your mind all the time, emotionally.

And so having these slices of the day where I could kind of slip off into my own mind and be working on something that was just for me, I think felt really essential.

And it felt essential in a way that writing had not felt essential for me in a long time, creatively.

And also, I have to say, my husband is a huge help.

He works from home.

He is completely an equal co-parent.

So, you know, as much as I wrote during nap time, it was also very much, you know, with his belief in what I was doing.

You talked about the fact that most of these kind of stories about people living double lives, being married to two people at once, and then carrying this kind of secret, they usually involved men.

Mm hmm.

And I know it was important to you that to explore it from from a different angle.

And in this case, had it be a woman who was in that situation.

Could you talk a little bit about why that was important and what you thought would you'd be able to kind of look into or that you wouldn't maybe be able to find otherwise?

Why why is it almost exclusively men know?

Because it was except for the writer Anais Nin.

She was the only woman I could find who had been found like who had been discovered to have led this double married life.

And she didn't have kids.

She didn't have kids while she was doing it.

But still, it's a rarity.

But looking at.

Okay, well, what stopped women?

And I think the answer is very it's easy.

It's obvious, Right?

You know, women didn't have the same level of financial independence as men for a very long time.

They couldn't just slip away on work trips for a week or two or even a few days if they were mothers, as we're talking about, you know, there needed an expected to be in the home in a very different way.

You know, women had to, I think, have their husbands come with them to the bank and sign permission for them to open credit cards up until the 1970s.

So I don't think that it's a morality reason.

Like, I don't think women are inherently more moral than men, although maybe but but I, I think the question I really wanted to answer was what would make a woman make these decisions?

What would take a woman to these, like, seemingly unfathomable places?

You know, I think that when I when I read the articles about men's secret families and double lives, they never seem to go into the emotional details of the experience for them about how it got started and how they justified it and how they dealt with the emotional fallout of this kind of deceit over a period of years.

And I think the emotional aspects were what I was really interested in.

You come to any conclusions yourself as you're you because you're you're sort of, you know, the characters are sort of unfolding for you as you're writing it.

Did you come to any conclusions about what would make her, say, marry her second husband rather than just maybe carry on an affair?

What what it was that made her think, this is what I need to do?

You know, he proposes one time and she turns him down, and the second time he proposes is in the immediate aftermath of enduring this massive earthquake together.

And so they have been sort of bonded by this traumatic experience.

And when he asks her the second time, she has this very clear feeling of if I say no now, I'm going to lose him.

And I think and even with Anais Nin, it was really interesting reading her diaries because the man that she ended up marrying, her second husband, he asked her repeatedly over the years and and it became very clear to her that she could only say no so many times before he left her.

And so for her, it became she said, yes in order to just keep him.

It was marriage or nothing.

It was marriage or nothing.

And I think similarly for Nora, I think she had the same feeling.

I think that she became addicted to what Andrés opened up for her personally.

You know, I think that he became sort of this conduit for her to explore herself in these new ways.

And I think that she was afraid that by saying no, again, she would lose that entirely.

So I don't think that she necessarily needed to be married to him.

But I think she she gave in to the pressure to be married to him in order to keep him.

When you're in the process, either either in the process of writing or after the fact, you do judge your characters at all.

Or is that sort of something that a fiction writer wants to steer clear of?

Yeah, I really I try not to.

You know, I think that, again, reading these stories about men in their secret families, it's very easy to judge.

It's very easy to be like, who?

Who could do this?

You know, it's that feeling of like, repulsion.

Right.

And disgust.

And I think also we're sort of in a time where we're all sort of judging each other very quickly without much nuance at all.

And so I really wanted to create complicated characters that would be easy to judge from a distance.

But up close, I wanted to make it more difficult for readers to judge them, and I wanted to know if I personally could come to a place of understanding for somebody who makes these choices.

And so, yeah, no, I you know, I tended to not judge them.

There's the old adage about how all writing is editing, and you went through, I think, about an 18 month period on More than you'll ever know, an 18 month period of editing with your agent.

And I think there were about 15 edits involved and that just that was mind blowing to me.

And that's that's, you know, I mean, again, the just the level of discipline and commitment and and a lot of trust with each other.

There have there had to have been that you're that you're seeing this as a positive experience and not and not you know not a demoralizing one.

Yeah.

You know and I mean and I mean it was it was a difficult I'm sure it had there had to be difficult moments as you continue to keep revising.

Oh, yeah.

I you know, I'm glad I didn't know from the first round that it was going to be 18 months.

You know, it was kind of every round I kind of thought would be the last.

And I think that's how, you know, I was able to get through it.

But also, yes, I really trusted my agent's opinions.

I trusted her feedback.

You know, there were times where she would come back with suggestions that didn't feel right for me, but we would jump on the phone and come to a diagnosis of the problem, you know?

And then I was able to sort of go off and come up with a solution that felt right for me and for the characters and for the book.

And then often, you know, it was it was very much like, you know, she yes, I would she's she's very much like a diagnostician.

You know, she's able to pinpoint where there's a problem, but she's not prescriptive in terms of what I need to do to solve it.

So it became, yeah, this really collaborative process over that period of of 18 months.

And then, you know, of course afterwards when it was sold and I had my U.S. editor and my UK editor, then it was another year, maybe a year and a half with them.

I also, you know, I worked as an editor and I enjoyed the process of editing.

And so I think that I think when you're working with people who you trust are trying to bring the project up to your own vision of it, instead of trying to make you make it their vision, then I think to me it becomes a process where, you know, I'm not defensive, where I'm open, where I'm excited to hear new ideas and get new perspectives.

To me, it's just a different it's a different kind of creative process.

It's more analytical.

But yeah, the response to the book has been so great.

Came out a year ago and recently was released in paperback.

You've got great reviews, New York Times, Washington Post, Elsewhere, Good Morning America Book Club, Edgar Award finalist.

How surprising was it or what were your expectations?

Did you have any expectations for the for the response to it once it was published?

Oh, I don't know if I. I didn't know.

I really didn't know what to expect.

You know, I have a lot of writer friends now and, you know, experiences really run the gamut, you know, And I think the consensus is none of us know how publishing works or what to expect at any time.

The Good Morning America news came six months before publication.

So I think when I mean, you know, when that happened, that was mind blowing.

And, you know, it was I got the call.

I had to miss it first because I was with my kids and then I called them back and they gave me the news and, you know, and I was just kind of like laughing and crying.

And my husband came into the room very alarmed.

You know, I was sobbing on the phone.

And then afterwards, my daughter said she had a dirty diaper.

I needed to change.

So it's very much like highs and lows.

They keep you grounded.

But I think after that, there was the hope.

You know, there was the hope of it reaching a lot of readers because of Good Morning America.

I one of my greatest dreams has always been getting reviewed in The New York Times.

And I was just dreaming of that and hoping for it, but not having any realistic expectation of it.

So I think overall, I've just I've just been really blown away by it.

The book is so it feels so cinematic and in reading it, it feels like it just naturally lends itself to to film or some kind of limited series.

And I my understanding, as you all are in the process of kind of exploring that and you've got writer and actor strike.

Yes.

Happening now, which complicates things.

But what, where do things stand with that?

Yeah.

So right now we have we had originally sold the film rights to the Obamas film production company Higher Ground.

We now have those rights back.

But we're waiting until we see what's going to happen with the strike before taking them back out to market to continue Do magazine writing.

And one piece that really struck me was the middle of 2022 where this was your Time magazine and you wrote about the fact that, you know, you love Texas, you want to stay in Texas, but Texas breaks your heart.

And I think that you're dealing with the politics of the state a lot of a lot of things that are that are difficult about living in Texas.

And I think there are a lot of people who who are lifelong Texans who love the state can relate to that.

Can you talk about what what inspired that?

Oh, you know, I think having kids has put a new sense of urgency on me when it comes to the politics of where we live.

You know, And there are people who say, well, politics is politics.

You know, just live your life.

But politics, you know, it is people's lives.

You know, I have to worry every day that my daughter, who is to Kindle next year, you know, I'm choosing schools.

You know, when I was talking with my group of friends around, you know, putting our where where our kids are going to go to KINDER We were we were comparing how schools, you know, do lockdown.

You wrote this just a few weeks probably after the about the school shooting.

Yeah.

You know of all the that it really kind of shook me to my core.

You know it was so it was so so close to home.

And I think so many of us feel that way.

But but yeah, really considering how do I want my kids to grow up when it comes to gun culture or gun violence, you know, do we want lockdown shootings to become normal for them?

You know, Texas leads the nation when it comes to book banning, which, you know, obviously as a writer, you know, I feel really deeply and strongly against any any form of book banning.

And so that's really concerning for me, the idea that, you know, our kids public educations and private educations will be formed by these smaller coalitions of parents who are trying to really decide and define what our kids learn about in school, which often excludes marginalized communities.

And so, you know, considering all of these thing women's rights.

Right.

You know, the fact that my daughter now has fewer rights than I did growing up or than my mom did, or I think maybe my grandmother, you know, the fact that if I think about my my experiences with infertility, you know, and I think if I were to get pregnant again unexpectedly and if you know that pregnancy didn't go well, the situation that women are finding themselves in, in Texas, in these experiences in so many others is horrifying.

And it should horrify all of us.

So.

So, yeah, you know, my husband's from Australia and we we talk about potentially going back there one day because they have found solutions to some of these problems like guns.

So yeah, it's something I think about every day.

And, you know, as you said, as a lifelong Texan, I love Texas.

You know, Texas is my home.

I don't ever want to leave, but it's hard not to consider it in in this climate.

Katy, thank you so much for being on Texas, talking to you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, so much.

We appreciate it.

That's all for this episode of Texas Talk.

Thanks for tuning in.

We'd love to hear from you.

If you have any thoughts or questions, please email us at Texas, talk at KLRN.org , we'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.