I haven’t been this struck or fallen in love this fast with a book in my life. I started reading it to my wife and couldn’t stop.
I don’t usually react to books this way. I picked this one up, got a few pages in, and went upstairs to get my wife so I could read it to her. I thought I’d read a page or two. I ended up reading fifty or sixty pages out loud before we had to get on with the day. I’ve never done that before with any book connected to this podcast.
So that’s really why I was so excited to have this conversation.
This is a discussion with Lori Carlson-Hijuelos about her book, A Writing Marriage, and about the life she shared with her husband, the writer Oscar Hijuelos. We talk about writing and faith and the literary world, but mostly we talk about marriage. What it looks like when two people build a life together over decades. And what it’s like when that life changes after one of them is gone.
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Lori Carlson-Hijuelos is an editor, translator, and writer whose career began at the Americas Society in New York City. She is the anthologist of many books, most notable among them Cool Salsa and Red Hot Salsa. She is also the author of three novels, including The Sunday Tertulia.
Oscar Hijuelos was one of America’s finest novelists of the late 20th century. He was the first American of Latino ethnicity, specifically Cuban-American, to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his beloved novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Among his other works is his acclaimed Mr. Ives’ Christmas, which reveals his Christian faith in the tradition of Catholicism.