A Mother, a Texan, a Writer: Katie Gutierrez’s Inspiration
From motherhood to a brush with mortality, Katie Gutierrez, the author of “More Than You’ll Ever Know,” reveals the powerful forces that shape her captivating storytelling.
Katie Gutierrez is the author of the national bestselling debut novel MORE THAN YOU’LL EVER KNOW, which is our BOOKED Trips Mexico City featured read. Her essays have appeared in TIME, Texas Highways, Harper’s Bazaar, and more. She has an MFA from Texas State University and lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and their two kids.Katie Gutierrez, a rising star in the literary world, shares her journey as a writer, mother, and Mexican-American. In this interview, Katie explores how motherhood has ignited her creativity and the challenges and triumphs of navigating the writing life.
Our BOOKED Trips Mexico City Travelers got the chance to meet Katie during a virtual book discussion which you can watch below.
We also got the chance to have an in-depth chat with Katie to hear more about her creative process, what’s she’s reading now and the literary giants who have shaped her voice. Dive into this interview and discover the unique blend of experiences that fuel her creativity and the literary giants who paved the way for her voice.
Beyond being a writer, what other identities are most important to you, and how do they influence your creative process?
I have a daughter who’ll be six very soon, and a son who’s three and a half—beyond being a writer, being their mother is my most important identity. Before having kids, I was worried that the work of motherhood, the daily labor of it, would keep me from writing. There’s an old quote that says there’s no more potent enemy of good art than “the pram in the hall.” And it’s true that motherhood is full-time work, and it could absolutely eclipse my writing time if I let it.
But I’ve also found that proverbial pram to be a great igniter of creativity. To make good art, I think you need to be open to the world, receptive, and nothing cracks you open like motherhood. There’s the physicality of it, from pregnancy, labor, and birth to the daily closeness of our bodies now—the hand-holding, hugging, kissing, wiping, cleaning, Band- Aiding, protecting—and the emotion of it, the twin flames of love and terror that come with
raising children, the knowledge that we can’t protect them from everything that might harm their bodies or break their hearts. The intensity of parenthood has made me push deeper in my writing, go toward the places that scare me. And logistically speaking, motherhood has made me a more purposeful writer.
My working windows are always shorter and less consistent than I’d like, but that forces me to make the minutes count. I’ve learned how to write through the chaos of life, instead of waiting for the chaos to subside, because I know now it never will.
My identity as a Mexican Texan is also extremely important to me. When I was growing up in Laredo, the population was almost entirely of Mexican origin. (Today it’s something like 96%, instead of 99%.) I realize now, after living outside Laredo for half my life, albeit still in South and Central Texas, how beautiful that experience was—not that Laredo is perfect by any means, but I was able to go through the most formative time of my life without any sense of marginalization for being Mexican, which gave me confidence and pride in my roots. I hope this comes through in my writing.
What is inspiring you right now personally and professionally?
In December 2023 I suddenly lost significant sight in my left eye. I was hospitalized, tested, misdiagnosed, re-tested, and so on until we arrived at the right diagnosis, which thankfully is not life-limiting like many of the possibilities we feared. It’s been a terrifying and challenging few months, where my body as I knew it was, if not failing, changing. Made suddenly fragile and unreliable. I’m still in treatment but feeling like myself (with the exception of my peripheral vision in that eye, which hasn’t returned), and it’s this—arriving at a new normal—plus, strangely, everything I experienced to get here, that’s inspiring much of my writing at the moment.
I’m also inspired by my writer friends, all of whom, without exception, are writing through the hard things in life: caretaking, parenthood, financial stress, full-time jobs, grief, etc. Very rarely are books written in extended peaceful solitude. We write in hourlong chunks, half- hours, in cars, at our kids’ gymnastics and swimming and ballet and doctor’s offices. My friends’ commitment to their art makes me recommit to mine every day.
At BOOKED Trips we bring travelers from the pages of some of our favorite books to the places they’re set in. What’s a book that transports you to a specific place in the world that you’d recommend to others?
Ooh, great question! Maddalena and the Dark, by Julia Fine, is set in 18th century Venice. It’s a deliciously dark Faustian fairy tale of a novel, and the setting is so vivid and alive, from the canals at night to the Pietà—the orphanage-slash-music school led by Antonio Vivaldi—to a gilded estate in the Italian countryside. It’s gorgeous on every level.
I also just finished reading an advance copy of Anna Downes’s upcoming Red River Road, which follows solo traveler Katy as she recreates her missing sister Phoebe’s #vanlife route through the Coral Coast of Western Australia. My husband is from Sydney, so I’m familiar with the Eastern side of the country, but reading Red River Road—as haunting and unsettling as it was—made me want to pack up for a road trip on the other side.
Who is in your writer hall of fame? Whose lineage do you write in or are you informed by?
I think if I could name my literary godparents, the authors whose novels shaped me intensely as a writer from a young age, I’d go with Madeleine L’Engle, Charlotte Brontë, and Gabriel García Marquez. A Wrinkle in Time is the first book that I remember astonishing me. It was high stakes, suspenseful, emotional, surprising, and it made quiet bookish children like me the heroes. I was maybe eight or nine, but I remember thinking, I want to do this. I want to make something like this.
It was a desperate yearning. Which is not to say I wanted to write a similar book or even in the same genre, but I wanted to write something that might astonish someone, or myself in creating it. For years, I read that novel multiple times a year. I also have to give childhood reading credit to R.L. Stine, The Babysitter’s Club, Lois Duncan, and Sweet Valley Twins.
Then there’s Jane Eyre, the first classic novel I fell in love with (and one that, incidentally, is inspiring my current novel draft!). Jane Eyre introduced to me to Gothic literature, which feels like it’s part of my reading and writing DNA, even if it’s not obvious in More Than You’ll Ever Know. In high school, I was reading a lot of commercial crime fiction, and Jane Eyre was a revelation, another moment of astonishment. I hadn’t known sentences could be beautiful, and again I felt: I want to do this. I was also, at the time, deeply compelled by the tortured romance
between Jane and Mr. Rochester; I wasn’t too troubled about the wife trapped in the attic. In college I read Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, and it changed my whole reading and understanding of Jane Eyre. I’m playing with some of these themes in my second novel.
And Gabriel García Marquez. By the time I read One Hundred Years of Solitude in my early twenties, I was struggling to find my voice as a writer. I was so ambitious, but my work was falling flat. I didn’t know how to write my culture, didn’t know how to evoke that aspect of my identity or my characters’ identities on the page. Hell, this sounds unthinkable to me now, but I didn’t know I was allowed to. So much of the canon was white. It made up the majority of my reading. But when I read Gabriel García Marquez, despite it being an English translation, it felt Latino to me in a way no other novel had—the rhythm of the sentences, the casual magic. I understood there was a vast other world of literature that I was suddenly desperate to access. I follow in the footsteps of the Latinx writers in the U.S. who came before me, when getting traditionally published was next to impossible. Even today, Latinx writers make up only about 6% of published authors, so it feels more important than ever to proudly represent elements of my culture in my novels.
What literary project would you LOVE to embark on if given complete creative freedom and unlimited time?
Ooh, this is a great question, and a hard one. I’m not one of those writers who has a zillion ideas at any given time. Once I’m working on a novel, that project consumes me, so as much as this may be a cop-out, I’ll say it’s the project I’m working on now. I can’t say too much about it yet, but it feels ambitious and exciting and challenging, and as much as all novels probably fall short of an author’s vision for them (the unwritten novel is always the best you’ve ever written!), I hope I can get it close.
Ready to embark on a literary adventure to Mexico City? Dive deeper into the world of Katie Gutierrez’s debut novel, “More Than You’ll Ever Know“, our BOOKED Trips Mexico City featured read. Follow along with our May 2024 BOOKED Trips Mexico City experience on Instagram and see how we brought Katie’s book to life by going to key areas described in the novel.
Inspired to experience Mexico City firsthand? BOOKED Trips can take you there! Explore the vibrant culture, rich history, and captivating locations that come alive in “More Than You’ll Ever Know”. Visit our website to learn more about our curated Mexico City itinerary, or contact us to craft a personalized literary adventure based on your favorite books.
