For The Millions Megan McDowell interviews Alejandro Zambra.

TM: Do you get frustrated with how people associate Chile with the Pinochet dictatorship? Do you feel a need to establish yourself in relation to it, because if you don’t others inevitably will?

AZ: It doesn’t frustrate me; on the contrary, it seems like a conventional and understandable expectation. That relationship is very important to me, also. I grew up in a dictatorship, I said my first words in a dictatorship, I read my first books in a dictatorship. It’s part of my experience, part of my life. And of course, Formas de volver a casa talks a lot about that. But I don’t believe in genre novels or in a simple relationship between literature and history. Literature doesn’t exist to depict something that’s already given, already processed. We write because we want to live in a different way, because we seek new ways of understanding the past, present and future.