Pitbull, Scarface and a whale walk into a book

Bookends with Mattea Roach39:44Pitbull, Scarface and a whale walk into a book

Pitbull, Scarface and a captive whale named Lolita seemingly don't have much in common, but in Jennine Capó Crucet's latest novel, Say Hello to My Little Friend, she manages to bring them all together in an ode to the magic of Miami.

"If I said I was from Miami, honestly, people would either reference within five seconds of meeting me or maybe five minutes, Scarface or Pitbull," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I was like, why are these the two like cultural touchstones for the city I'm from when I see it as so much more of a robust and interesting place?"

In Say Hello to My Little Friend, Pitbull-impersonator Izzy Reyes receives a cease-and-desist letter from the iconic rapper's legal team. Living in his aunt's garage, he yearns for money, respect and a girlfriend — and launches himself on a quest to become a modern-day version of Scarface drug lord Tony Montana.

But when these attempts lead him to the Miami Seaquarium tank of orca Lolita, he reckons with forces of nature and the truth behind his arrival story from Cuba.

Born to Cuban parents, Capó Crucet is the writer of Make Your Home Among Strangers, which won the International Latino Book Award, How to Leave Hialeah, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize and the John Gardner Book Award, and My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education, which was longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. She is currently based in North Carolina.

She joined Mattea Roach on Bookends to discuss her connection to Miami, the expectations of the publishing industry and how Say Hello to My Little Friend came to be.

Mattea Roach: Your novel is set in Miami in 2017. Miami's a city where you were born and raised and it's been a preoccupation of your other books as well. I'm wondering how the city inspires you as a writer. Why do you keep coming back to it even though you're not living there anymore?

Jennine Capó Crucet: I once had a teacher tell me that all writing comes from a lack, that everything we do comes from some hole or something we're missing. I don't know if I agree with that, but I would say that probably my career thus far would be evidence that supports that professor's idea of where writing comes from. 

Whenever I am back in Miami, I don't write at all. I don't feel the desire. It's like I've gone into some weird tunnel or force field and I'm just present in a different way. Then whenever I'm not there, my imagination is still stuck there. The impulse is to write about it. 

With this book, I was really trying to exorcise the demon. I was just like, "I'm done. I don't want to write about Miami anymore." Actually, I don't know that I don't because the book I'm now working on is still set in Miami. But I thought, what if everything I've ever wanted to say, every observation I've ever had about this city, I found a way to weave it into one book. If I drain the well, what comes back up? 

I've never been satisfied with the way it's depicted in popular culture and I've just done my best to add one more voice.- Jennine Capó Crucet

Miami is such a fascinating place. I've never been satisfied with the way it's depicted in popular culture and I've just done my best to add one more voice to that for longevity's sake.

MR: Why is Miami something that on some level you feel you want to escape in your writing? What leads to this push and pull where it is this endless well, where you keep having new ideas and inspirations and things you want to talk about, but then also you want to get away from it on some level? 

JCC: That's a good question and now I'm going to stay up all night thinking about it because I'm wondering if it's really not because of anything inside of me and more about like the pressure of an industry. Being like, I don't want to be thought of as just a Miami writer, even though that is exactly what I've always wanted to be, what I've set out to be. 

I don't want to be thought of as just a Miami writer, even though that is exactly what I've always wanted to be, what I've set out to be.- Jennine Capó Crucet

I think because at this stage of my life, I have lived outside of Miami more than I've lived inside of it. Miami is a city that changes every time I'm back.

It's totally different and yet somehow still, at its core, essentially the same city. I'm fascinated with nailing down that core, somehow. So maybe once I've achieved that, I'll be interested in writing about something else. It hasn't happened just yet.

MR: What was the first story that came to you in writing this novel — was it Lolita the whale's or Izzy's?

JCC: I started writing the Izzy/Scarface material when my first novel was on submission back in 2013. My first novel was doing well with publishers, but they kept asking for changes. In those editorial meetings when you're trying to sell the book, people kept saying, "This just isn't the Cuban American novel that we expect." 

I would get in these meetings again as a first time novelist being like, "What did you expect? Why is there a certain expectation?"

So I started writing it as a way of coping with some of those rejections, some of those comments that felt like the book wasn't performing a certain version of Latinidad that these editors were comfortable publishing at the time.

I was like, "Okay, you want that? I'll give you Scarface, I'll give you Pitbull, I'll give you all the ridiculous caricatures that you are comfortable looking at." And I never expected that to be something anybody would ever read. It was really for my own catharsis as I was going through that.

And I should say, too, I owe a lot to Percival Everett's novel Erasure, which I read at the same time — it's about a writer who writes this other novel because they can't get the novel that they really wrote published.

My passion project was this whale novel. And I was like, this has absolutely no plot because what plot can you make out of someone just circling a tank their entire life? The magnitude of the boredom and the magnitude of the isolation that Lolita must have felt — I was just like, no one's going to want to read this because it's so sad.

So I can't honestly tell you when I realized that they were the same book except that I did have an agent tell me to get rid of all the whale stuff and that he was like, "I could sell this a lot easier if you just write what you're supposed to be writing." So I fired that guy and found a wonderful agent who saw the project for what it was and what it was trying to do. 

The two parts honestly came together the most in the early days of the pandemic when we all had a small taste of the isolation that Lolita would be feeling. Her whole existence and being far from creatures, animals in her life that she loves, her family. A lot of us were far from our families in those days. But I was very surprised to find out those were the same book.

And as you could probably tell from the writing, when they collide in the writing, is when it collided for me as the writer.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.