For a brief moment, Valeria Luiselli stood at the center of the world, even though she wasn’t herself there. The middle opened up during a lunch break at a conference in Washington, D.C., and the person who placed Luiselli at the center of his world was my colleague Ignacio Sánchez Prado. All Nacho cares about is his wife, his dog, tacos, and literature; the order is flexible. Now, his attention was entirely fixed on Luiselli. Is she really that talented, or is she simply overhyped? Is calling it “hype” sexist? Can we just love Luiselli, or is it better to keep our distance, if only because she comes from the educational elite? Is she Mexican or a gringa, or somehow both, and what does any of that have to do with the quality of her literature? Nacho reached for the carnitas and seasoned them with literary criticism, gossip, and hunger. His enthusiasm was contagious.

The daughter of a diplomat and a Zapatista, and the granddaughter of an activist, Luiselli had a childhood that seems as adventurous as some of her stories. She was born in Mexico City in 1983, but moved to the United States at the age of two and subsequently grew up in Costa Rica, South Korea, South Africa, and India. She returned to Mexico as a teenager in order “to become Mexican,” as she puts it, studying philosophy at UNAM before going to Columbia for her PhD; she has lived in New York for the past twenty years. And the gossip? She married a Mexican writer, had a daughter, separated, and had a second daughter.

Living outside Mexico had separated Luiselli from a language that she “wrote herself back into” with her 2010 essay collection Papeles falsos. Faces in the Crowd (Los ingrávidos), published a year later, contains a novel within a novel, like her latest book. Her breakthrough came in 2013 with The Story of My Teeth (La historia de mis dientes), which she developed in conversation with workers at the Jumex juice factory. To this day, it remains the favorite book not only of one lunch break with Nacho Sánchez Prado, but of an entire Mexican generation.

Writing Tell Me How It Ends, Luiselli switched to English. Both this “Essay in 40 Questions” and the novel that followed, Lost Children Archive, draw on her work as an interpreter for migrant children in the United States. “The problem with trying to tell their story,” Luiselli writes, “is that it has no beginning, no middle and no end.” Recounting a life, putting it into sequence—how does one do it?