Deep into our conversation, Kristen Millares Young’s kittens got into it with a bigger cat from next door, and she broke off to send him back to his side of the street. It wasn’t the only line she drew that afternoon.
Desire Lines, out October 6 from Red Hen Press, is Millares Young’s first memoir, a book of essays that digs into her matrilineage in the Cuban diaspora, follows the ancient mother goddess Cybele, and reckons with her estrangement from her parents. The essays keep circling back to valleys, the sea, and, again and again, truth. She came to the book by way of a novel, Subduction, and two decades in journalism.
The question I most wanted to ask her is one the book keeps asking, too: How do you measure how much to say, and how little, and how do you say it in a way that doesn’t betray yourself, whatever your family thinks? So much of her answer lives in the book’s form, not just its content: the second person she keeps turning on the reader, the rage that slips into her parentheses, the bomb she folds into the middle of a sentence.
She was direct about what the telling has cost her. At 20, she walked Havana’s streets at night with sex workers; later, she knocked on doors on Miami’s homicide beat. Twenty years later, performing her essays onstage felt every bit as risky. She was clear about who she wrote the book for, and why.
Full disclosure: Kristen and I know each other, which may be why our conversation got so real. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Katie Lee Ellison: It’s a little tough for me to ask you about this book, because it’s all kind of close to home in a lot of ways.
Kristen Millares Young: Was it hard for you to read?
KLE: It’s funny, because I was getting angry at you in the first 50 pages or something, because I was like, “Kristen, just say it.” But that was the whole point, turns out. I also wrote—this line on 196, “She’s lethal because she’ll write about it,” from this nameless family member—I just wrote “lol.”
KMY: When the telling is considered more dangerous than the action, you’re in dubious territory.
KLE: For all that is built up and withheld in the first 50 to 75 pages, there’s such a massive release in this second-to-last section. What is it called? “It was dark in the womb.” And it really gave me a physically warm, flush feeling in my body. So it pays off, is what I’m saying.
KMY: I’ve also been having very powerful responses to art. Poetry, a year ago, started making my head tingle.
KLE: We’re in really desperate times. Truth is hard to come by, and maybe that’s a good place to start. Do you know how many times the word “truth” appears in this book?
KMY: No.
KLE: A lot. It’s a lot.
KMY: It is, and I should have done an audit.
KLE: What is your definition of truth? And in what ways were you reaching for it in these pages?
KMY: Truth is what happened. What happened, happened, and people can construct their own narratives about what it meant. But there are fundamental elements of a story, and its telling, that are anchored in what actually transpired. And then, of course, there are our emotional truths that are layered onto that, and how we interpret the meaning of what we’ve experienced so that we may continue living with that memory. But I think that it’s also important—perhaps it’s my background as an investigative journalist—to establish a set of facts. And that has been remarkably difficult in my family.
KLE: In my own efforts to define what happened, I find that going back to the same memory, it returns differently almost every time. So how do you define what happened, if not by memory, which we know to be fickle or changing?
KMY: It’s important to understand that you can establish a certainty or a feeling of confidence in your own relationship to your memories. And you don’t have to have that ratified by someone else who was a stakeholder in the situation. A lot of times in families, we really try hard to create a unified narrative, and that is often what is needed, not only in families, but also in friendships and romantic relationships—a shared narrative about what the meaning of that relationship is, and how it has come to be. But you don’t have to have someone else agree with your version of your own life.
That’s part of what’s so fascinating to me about this misogynist tide that’s overtaken our nation, is that it’s so much about the oppression of women’s narratives, as a way of creating power for those who hate our independence, to oppress us. So first, they have to tell you what your own life means. Families can operate like that, too. There’s this agenda that they’re pushing that serves the patriarchal order of the family, and in order for you to carry it forward, you have to swallow the story. A lot of times, in estrangement, what happens is that your body just says, “Enough. I will not subject myself to your framework. Period.” And that is one of the most powerful things that a woman can do, or anyone can do: decide not to participate in our own oppression, and not to participate in our own ill-treatment. And setting and holding a boundary, to say, “No, I expect to be treated with care and love, and if I don’t receive that respect and investment, then I’m not here for it.” I’m not here for the rest of it, because all it’s serving is psychological distress.
KLE: A lot of the rage comes through in parentheses. So I wonder what your take is on the role that rage has to play on the page in real time, in full experience of that rage.
KMY: I think anger is very clarifying. Anger is a wonderful indication of some kind of injustice having been perceived deeply by the animal body, right? And so it’s information. Anger is just information that allows you to make decisions. And a lot of people try to divest women of our anger because they know that an angry woman is capable of making very severe decisions. They want us to be mutable, they want us to be moldable. And so staying in right relation to one’s own anger is actually a way of truing the compass on how we must act. But in order to remain in relation to the anger, it’s good to recognize it for what it is. Name it, and practice mindfulness, so that you can hold the truth of how much we are at variance as women in this country, and as women in our families—our belief in ourselves is at variance with what is wanted for us, or from us. And so, in order not to succumb to oppressive expectations, we need to remain in relation to our anger. It’s strengthening.
Having narrated the audiobook, and having written the book, I realize how much I’m asking of the reader. Because to actually be in intimate juxtaposition with the truth of a woman’s life, we are asked to carry so much. And for someone to come into your story as a reader and carry it with you for a while, that’s the communion, of course, that we are seeking when we decide to tell our stories. But I realize how much it also asks of the reader to sit with the discomfort, to sit with the pain, and also with the joy, and to really understand that we as women, our experience has range. And should. And that range is something that repeats also in the landscape of the book, and in the scope of history that I refer to, right? I try to provide some context, so that we don’t get lost in this morass of ahistorical moralizing that is being foisted on us by men who want to control us. I won’t have it. I don’t care if it’s my father. No.
KLE: Of course, especially if it’s your father. ’Cause they’re supposed to love you.
KMY: Right? As you are, or for who you are.
KLE: There is so much second person in this book. I wanted to ask you: Who is “you” in this book? And who are the imperatives for?
KMY: Well, first, it’s a self-exhortation, of course, because when you’re writing for the first time, you’re speaking to yourself. But then, of course, you’re aware that the reader is going to find themselves inside that “you.” And so then you’re having a conversation that’s grown larger. But that is the same reader that you’ve also transposed into the “I” as they have been reading through your lived experience. And so it kicks them out, for a second, and then puts you into a direct conversation that is also the conversation that you began having with yourself first. And so I guess it begins there, with that direct address.
KLE: With yourself, or your reader, or both, or everybody?
KMY: Everybody. All of us, all at once. In the end of that essay, “Every Woman Keeps a Flame Against the Wind,” I write, “Give it a try, in your own way. I’m listening.” This is a practice. My liberatory practice of telling this story is something that I hope will inspire other people to do the same for themselves. And so, usually when you’re asking someone to do something hard, you need to be direct. And that holds true with self-exhortation as well.
When the telling is considered more dangerous than the action, you’re in dubious territory.
KLE: This is a point that you touch on in your book, about how much you want to say. And you do this really interesting thing again and again where you fold in a bomb in the middle of a paragraph, in the middle of a sentence.
KMY: You’re hyped on my tricks.
KLE: I’m trying to pay attention. It’s my job. So I’m curious what your take is on that. Are you going to keep writing nonfiction and memoir and essay? Where do you think the value is in what you tell and how much you tell, if any, and will you continue to do it?
KMY: Yes, but not right away. I have a very full life, and obviously most of that life is not contained within the book, because you can’t, right? To produce from personal experience and not be iterative, you have to live, right? The next book, I’m 60,000 words in on a novel. But it feels just as searingly personal, somehow. And all of my work feels that way to me, like it burns my hands. And so I am going to give myself a respite from memoir.
Producing this book was the most emotionally costly thing I’ve ever done in my life.
I think that the conversations that I’m having with women like you—those conversations are the yield, the intellectual intimacy with women thinkers and writers. Because when you reveal your soul, people let theirs shine, too, and it changes the tenor of living in a way that’s rewarding. That’s the deep joy that I was reaching for the whole time, out of the loneliness of childhood, into the fullness of my midlife, with narrative as the tool. Build a place for me to live in my mind and in the world.
KLE: Something you said about the octopus: “Other octopus species cohabitate. Her kind does not, which I admire.” And I was curious about why there’s admiration there, when the culmination of this story is so surrounded by cohabitation, and those who do it with you.
KMY: I’m in my own psychological lair, even though I’m surrounded by my family—my husband, my children. This woman can still disappear under a rock, okay?
KLE: Do you believe in forgiveness, and how do you define what forgiveness is?
KMY: Oh, I absolutely believe in forgiveness. It’s critical. But I also think that forgiveness has been weaponized to keep women in their place, which I refuse.
KLE: How do you do it?
KMY: It’s a decision, but you don’t just forgive once, and then you’re good. Right? It’s a practice. Like joy. It’s a practice, and a discipline. It’s easy to sink back down into the sense of betrayal, or injustice and indignation. But that’s not my vibe.
KLE: So, at one point, it was around page 110, where you were writing about assimilation in a real-time kind of way. Something about that page in particular rang up something in my mind of Saeed Jones’s memoir, How We Fight for Our Lives. I thought about how much he exposed about his family life, and how much dancing you’re doing around what to expose. What your brain or trauma will allow, and how to depict that. And also this question of, not to compare, but where Latina or Latinx culture plays into this discussion that you get into about shame and silence that’s very Catholic. So I wondered if you wanted to say anything about the ways that assimilation specifically is a very particular kind of silence.
KMY: I was given a hard-work narrative that relied on my family’s adjacency to whiteness: because we look the way that we do, if we work as hard as we know how to work—which is part of the immigrant experience—then we would get the benefits of being in this country.
I have accrued extraordinary access in my life here as an American, and their decision to uproot themselves and plant our family here, which was very painful, resulted in extraordinary benefits for the family. I went to Harvard. My voice is heard when I choose to speak. My children do not want for anything. That is absolutely a result of decisions that they made.
My Cuban grandparents, the decisions that they made as a couple, and the other side of my family, by having been in the military and advanced themselves economically through that mechanism, converged in my lifetime into a life of real privilege. And because you can’t ever give privilege away, I’ve really felt that I’ve needed to put it to work.
With this book, the work that I am doing is trying to embolden others to accept and embrace the truth of their lives, and believe in their own value, and move forward with their heads held high.
You asked earlier about shame, Latinidad. I think that there has been a sense that, as a community, we need to hide our shadows, because we’re already persecuted by virtue of being who we are, and so we can’t give any weaponry to anyone who might have cause to criticize our communities, which of course is why César Chávez’s violences were covered for so long. It’s at work at the highest reaches of even those wings of the Latino community that I would want to be in solidarity with. There are extreme expectations from Latino communities, particularly those tinged by Catholicism, which is most of them, for a certain way of being as a woman. Sometimes respecting the community, or respecting the family, is code for: Stay in line. It’s at every level, from how we speak, to who we fuck, to what we write, to how we just show up in every way in the world.
It can be difficult to claim a space in our community because I am agnostic. I do not have the church communities that are certainly a backbone of many Latino circles. Part of it is moving past the shame of not being what you were expected to be. And then, really, moving past that to a point of becoming very proud of who you decided to be, despite the strong countervailing pressures. It is as relentless as water, this cultural control. A culture is a family of families. Right? It can get exhausting to contemplate. It’s not over. It can feel like it’s over, as these paradigms clamp down in our country. But we’re still making the story.
KLE: I am white, and I present so. But to have so much undercurrent identification with your experience with assimilation, it’s very interesting to consider how multi-pronged that might be.
KMY: Well, it makes you privy to conversations that don’t contemplate your existence. It’s difficult. Then you have to advocate for your perspective in a situation where you’ve already been shown to be deeply unsafe. So I’ve become very adept at that. And of course, I’ve used my privilege, as a reporter, to care deeply about the lives of women and peoples and places that have been mistreated, and tell their stories as a way of encouraging better choices at individual and also systemic levels. All of that, it can be put to work.
KLE: There’s always the question of survival, and the question of how it is that you manage to meet the world outside your door on its terms, because you can’t control them.
KMY: There’s so much to gain from contemplating a woman’s experience. The people that I want to be strengthened are the women, first and foremost. I was at Reyna Tropical. She was like, “Brown femmes to the front!” It was so funny: All the Latinas, we came flying toward the stage.
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Kristen Millares Young is a novelist, journalist, essayist, and the author of the novel Subduction and the memoir Desire Lines, recently published by Red Hen Press and Brilliance Audio. Her essays, book reviews, and investigations appear in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Literary Hub, and the anthologies No Contact, Advanced Creative Nonfiction, Latina Outsiders, and Alone Together. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer Prize. A former Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House, she is the editor of Seismic, a finalist for a 2021 Washington State Book Award. In 2025, Kristen was in residence for Storyknife Writers Retreat and Reykjavík Writes. She is a co-founder and former board chair of InvestigateWest.
Katie Lee Ellison created the Seattle-based international literary event series, Nonfiction for No Reason. You can find her column of author interviews and culture writing in The Stranger, and essays in Shenandoah, The Seventh Wave, J Journal, and elsewhere. She’s a contributing editor at Moss Literary Journal, and her memoir has been supported by the Sewanee Writers Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Tin House/MWC Oregon Summer Workshop, and Hugo House.
Cover image credit: “View of Cuba taken during ISS Expedition 36.” Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center. 23 May 2013. Public domain.
