Gina Apostol

Gina Apostol is the author of the novels Insurrecto, Gun Dealers' Daughter, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. She is the recipient of a PEN/Open Book Award and two Philippine National Book Awards. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, and Massachusetts Review. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines.

Apostol's new novel is Bibliolepsy.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is what the book is about: bibliolepsy. It’s a made-up word, so if you don’t know what it means, you should read the book. The title’s this neologism because my character’s love for books was bodily—and to call it bibliolepsy, like epilepsy or catalepsy, rather than bibliomania or bibliophile, for me sums up that electric bodily charge, a kind of enchanted seizure, that reading books had for this character.

What's in a name?

I was first going to name my character Primi Paragraf. You can tell I was only nineteen when I began it. I could also have named her Peri Phrastic, but I didn’t. I liked the word primipara—it means a person who is bearing her first child, and this was my first book. Anyway, I named my character Primi Peregrino instead, since the other name, yes, was corny.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self began this novel. So she would not be very surprised, I think.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

The beginnings and endings of my novels are the ones that never change. I very stubbornly don’t change beginnings. I really am very stubborn. And I always know, before I begin my novels, where or how they will end. It’s the middle part that’s the nightmare—how to get from beginning to end. I never know that part. That’s why I write the novels—to figure it out. That’s where all my work and agony lie.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

All my novels deal with the act of reading, or have a text within a text, or have someone writing or recalling a story. So the connection is that I’m always thinking about storytelling, how a reader reads, et cetera. My novels, I guess, echo my preoccupations. Otherwise, no, I have never been a compulsive, poet-fucking bibliolept, a daughter of gun dealers, a late nineteenth-century revolutionary soldier, a white filmmaker doing a pseudo-Apocalypse Now based on the Philippine-American war, or a Filipino translator fighting the filmmaker doing a pseudo-Apocalypse Now. But all of them share my preoccupation with reading and with this key contemporary question: who should tell the story?

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” was the ghost of my last book Insurrecto. Karen Carpenter is haunting my next one. So yeah, I sadly have seventies music running through my brain and in my books. I love including the corniest things about my childhood in my books—it’s part of the fun of writing. You make relevant what seemed only childish before.

Visit Gina Apostol's website.

--Marshal Zeringue