Fiction or Not: The Juarez Novel

My friend Nancy stopped by yesterday—unexpected, unannounced. The glads in the vase were past their prime, I was overdue for a date with Windex, a spider had been busy whitewalling the post rails outside, and the geraniums were sadly ill-attended (I'm not going to talk about the dust). The house looked neglected, and frankly, this past week, it has been. I have been in another world. I have been writing. The boys have eaten. The bills have been paid. The clients are happy. But the house? Not so much.

Nancy had come to return an ARC of The Heart is Not a Size, the Juarez novel due out next March. I'd wanted Nancy to have the story early, for her husband and daughter were among the many with whom I'd traveled to Juarez a few years ago. They had been there, and Nancy had not, and it seemed to me that the book was a way to impart to her some of what we had seen and felt in that faraway place. We talked about many things yesterday, Nancy and I, but at the end we talked about what was real and what was not in this novel elixir called Heart. The dust storm was real, I promised. So were the men who sat on neighboring roofs, watching us from above. So was the morning honk of an old woman's old goose. So was the half skull of a horse in the street.

And so, as well, was the little girl, pictured here.

Some brands of beauty we simply cannot make up.