Something To Declare
By Julia Alvarez
Algonquin Books, $20.95
ISBN 1565121937

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You don't have to read the essays in Something to Declare, Julia Alvarez's first book of nonfiction, in any particular order. Each essay stands perfectly well on its own. But if you start with the first essay called "Grandfather's Blessing" and work your way through to "Writing Matters," you'll be treated to an honest and enlightening story that chronicles the evolution of an insecure adolescent immigrant from the Dominican Republic into a best-selling American novelist.

Alvarez was ten years old when her parents fled the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo to settle in New York City. The essays in the book's first section, called "Customs," focus on the difficult and disorienting process of integrating two disparate cultures. "The tradition of storytelling is deeply rooted in Dominican culture," Alvarez writes, and she credits her Latino roots for her faith "that stories can save you." She also acknowledges that if she had stayed in the Dominican Republic it would have been much more difficult for her to make her way as a teacher and writer. In "La Gringuita," she both mourns and defends the inevitable distance that she and her sisters created between themselves and the Spanish language. While breaking free from the old world limitations imposed on women, they also lost the ability to speak their native language without an accent.

The second section of the collection, called "Declarations," revolves around Alvarez's discovery that she could bridge the two worlds of America and the Dominican Republic by writing. In essays such as "So Much Depends" and "Grounds for Fiction," she describes her writing life with a frank clarity that will glue would-be writers to the page. You learn how Alvarez chooses a topic and does her research and what her typical writing day is like. Perhaps most inspiring is the essay called "Have Typewriter Will Travel" in which Alvarez describes her years as a struggling writer until her "oft-rejected manuscript," How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, finally found a publisher.

All readers will enjoy Alvarez's touching and detailed descriptions of her immigrant family. Aspiring writers will find it particularly instructive to follow the journey that connects the young Alvarez, who told her grandfather she wanted to be a poet, with the middle-aged woman at a book reading, who tells her audience why writing matters.

Connie Miller lives and writes in Seattle.