A Review of Julia Alvarez’s ¡Yo!—Revisited

One way to define a writer is she who is able to make what obsesses her into everyone’s obsession.
Julia Alvarez, “Grounds for Fiction,” Something to Declare


Julia Alvarez is the writer that holds the greatest influence over me. In my own work, I try to emulate her. But when I do so, I take the verb “to emulate” directly from its Latin origins—emulatio—which, as practiced by the writers of the Renaissance, implied an attempt to improve on one’s models. It's the best way for an artist to pay tribute to his or her influences.

I freely admit that the structure of Bernardo and the Virgin is deeply indebted to Julia’s third novel, ¡Yo! Rummaging through my bookshelves recently, I rediscovered an appraisal I had written of this novel. I came up with this piece at the request of the editors of Cold Mountain Review. The review originally appeared in the Fall issue of 1997, and because I still treasure Alvarez's novel, I’d like to share my take on it once again.


¡Yo! by Julia Alvarez

The publication of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) marked the auspicious novelistic debut of Julia Alvarez, a writer who would become one of the foremost exponents of an increasingly visible and talented corps of Latino and Latina authors. The García Girls is bittersweet. In the novel, the pain of expatriation resides alongside the joys of the characters’ discovery of their new selves as they adapt, seldom without considerable trauma, to a new country, a new culture, and a new language. Told through the eyes of Yolanda García, Yo for short, the narrator does not spare the feelings of her subjects: she tells the family story in its entirety, blemishes and all. As readers we become witnesses of how cultural displacement, rather than uniting a family, can serve as a divisive force. Nonetheless, the humorous and compassionate moments are what one remembers most upon turning the last page of the book.

In her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), Alvarez brings to her American readers the moving story of the Mirabal sisters, code name Las Mariposas, whose deaths at the hands of Rafael Trujillo’s henchmen marked the beginning of the end of the second-longest one-man dictatorship in the history of the Americas. Reaching back into a dark episode of her former country’s history, Alvarez succeeds in her attempt to immerse her readers in this tragic event in the lives of the Dominican people. She accomplishes this despite the political, cultural, and linguistic barriers that would normally make the telling of such a story impossible. The Dominican-American writer performs a miracle of almost biblical proportions: she brings the Mirabal sisters back to life, making their sacrifice meaningful to readers outside of the Latin American culture.

Alvarez’s third novel, ¡Yo! (1997), is, perhaps, her greatest feat as a novelist. This work further examines the life of Yolanda María Teresa García de la Torre, the narrator of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. The problem for Yo, however, is that now the tables are turned on her. Instead of having the freedom to continue being the storyteller, she is now the subject of sixteen different characters who seek to paint the portrait, unflattering at times, of the artist.

¡Yo! is reminiscent of the second part of Don Quixote de la Mancha. Like Cervantes’s novel, Alvarez’s work begins with the characters’ acute awareness of themselves as literary personages. They know that they have been written about, and they are not happy about it. Angered at their lives being appropriated for fictional fodder, the members of the García family are horrified by Yo’s newfound celebrity status. Yo is constantly on book tours; she appears on television talk shows to continue exposing the family dirt. Her “novel” is studied in college classrooms and, worst of all, they can no longer speak to their daughter and sisters without first contacting her literary agent. But this is only the beginning.

As we work our way through fifteen more exposés on Yo, we hear from a cousin, a former teacher, a former student whose story she plagiarized in order to receive tenure, Dominican campesinos whose lives she impacted during writing retreats in her country of birth, and we even hear from a mentally disturbed stalker who has pursued Yo for years and whose obsession with the fictional author has increased thanks to her fame. The stories charm, enchant, and at times bewilder the reader. Yo, as portrayed by these wonderfully constructed and varied narrative voices, is a complex individual. She is vulnerable and very sensitive to any sort of criticism. Yet she can also be remarkably strong when confronted with injustices, poverty, death, and abusive or failed relationships.

What emerges from the narrative is a skewed portrait of the artist, one that is full of contradictions that seem irreconcilable. Still, the stories are told with Alvarez’s key signatures: humor, passion, and compassion. At the end, we sense that we have experienced an astounding narrative juggling act. Like Cervantes, Alvarez knows that humor can probe deeply into tales of startling truths and wisdom. And also like Cervantes, she performs a literary miracle.