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Claire Jiménez is a Puerto Rican writer who grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. She is the author of the short story collection Staten Island Stories, which received the 2019 Hornblower Award for a first book from the New York Society Library, was named a finalist for the International Latino Book Awards, a New York Public Library Favorite Book about New York, and Best Latino Book of 2019 by NBC News. She received her M.F.A. from Vanderbilt University and is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her fiction, essays and reviews have appeared in Remezcla, Afro‑Hispanic Review, PANK, The Rumpus, el roommate, Eater, District Lit, The Toast and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is her debut novel.
Claire Jimenez's website
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This is a novel about family, but the three sisters are its heart. What was important for you to represent in this portrait of sisterhood?
I was interested in how often siblings who have grown up with each other share an inside vocabulary and reference points, how sometimes they can communicate complicated emotions or ideas without even using words. (This goes back to my understanding of how silence shapes voice.) Some of that bond feels unnamable, even mysterious, but it is a definite force. The Ramirez sisters fight, but they also love each other fiercely.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez walks the tightrope of grief and hope in what is a powerful balancing act. How did you consider both of these elements while writing the novel
I thought carefully about each character's relationship to grief and how that sits in their body and transforms the way they see the world. Nina's response, her cynicism, her insistence that Ruthy ran away is a defense mechanism—even her humor is at times a way to deflect. Jessica's hope comes from a deep place of guilt, and the enormous sense of responsibility you feel for your younger sisters when you are the oldest. And the mother's grief was the most difficult for me to write. It took many ...
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the... (more)
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