Andrés N. Ordorica, a writer based in Edinburgh, previously made his name as a poet of stunning clarity and energy with his debut collection, At Least This I Know. He has now applied this poetic sensibility to the world of fiction, to profound success.
Chosen as an Observer Best Debut Novelist of 2024, and recently nominated for this year’s Kavya Prize, Ordorica has already made his mark in prose with his brilliantly compelling debut novel, How We Named the Stars, published this summer. A queer love story which unfolds as a meditation on grief, belonging, and those heady years of early adulthood, it’s a novel which confirms itself as one of the most affecting and luminous of the year.
Hi Andrés, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to SNACK. Tell us a bit, to start, about the genesis of How We Named the Stars. Where did the story of Daniel and Sam begin, for you? Do you remember when the first ideas came together? Was it always going to be a love story?
I began drafting what would eventually become HWNTS as my twenties drew to a close, and I was processing the remnants of grief at a distance. At the age of nineteen, I experienced a loss that profoundly shaped me. In many ways, I had made it through all the major stages of grief, but it was the idea of nearing my thirties and passing through a whole decade that my friend, S, did not get to witness and then about to start another one she’d not get to experience. For me, that was the seedling for wanting to explore Daniel and Sam’s story – the transformational beginning of early adulthood and how love and grief can shape the people we become or are becoming. Returning to that moment of loss, I realised there was still so much I needed to untangle for myself, and as a writer, sometimes the most rewarding means of doing so is through character, affording me, the writer, some additional distance and reprieve.
I’m interested in the vantage point from which the story is told – a retrospective narration from the future, infused with nostalgia, addressed to Sam often in the second person. What opportunities did this method open up for you, instead of a more linear, or conventional, structure? Did you always plan to tell the story in this way?
As I said, this story was informed by personal loss, and so I think I was already looking through a lens of nostalgia, but I grew up in the theatre and trained as a playwright, and until my early twenties I believed that would be my path in life. It was this way of telling stories that I knew best. I loved the episodic and epic quality of Tony Kushner, Moisés Kaufman, and Anna Deavere Smith, whose plays totally blew my mind as I didn’t think a play could break from the traditional three-act structure. In grad school, I fell in love and read every play by British playwright Nick Payne, and attended every show I could at the former Ovalhouse in London (now moved to Brixton) who were champions of inventive theatre making. I truly believe that chapter of my life shaped my approach to novel writing. As a writer, I am not really interested in a conventional, linear story. I like giving the reader a bit of a head start, and then slowly revealing to them the wider picture, to either challenge or complement their understanding in the same way a spotlight might give way to the full theatrical set. But the decision to use second person was a last-minute inclusion, in truth. I felt that the novel was so steeped in loss that I needed to add a kind of softness and buffer. By allowing Daniel to speak to Sam, and the reader to become him, the grief became less abstract. It could be pinned to a person, to shared memories, helping Daniel be less alone in his grief.
To that end, the opening of the novel is surprising – as it happens in the first few pages, I wouldn’t say it’s a spoiler to note that the focal character of the book has his death announced at the very beginning. It sets the novel up as an elegy. In what way does writing appeal to you as a form of memorialisation or reclamation? The book is filled with grief and loss, and writing appears to be one way of resisting its consequences, even neutralising them.
In so many ways, words, objects, the landscape are the things that outlive us – these will go on to be our memorials. They will tell of our love, our sadness, our wonderment as a people. The power that writing possesses to memorialise and immortalise is deeply profound to me and I think speaks to the experience of queerness. Poems, books, songs are a living queer archive and often, many of us come into our queerness with the guiding help of these words. That I, as a reader, can engage with a poem or a text from another culture, another century, another life, is so wondrous. And so I was definitely writing to that idea of the power of words to transform such an unwieldy emotion, like grief, into something tangible, or at least legible. However, I would challenge the notion that the book, and Daniel’s act of writing, neutralises his grief. If anything, I feel it heightens it. He could easily choose to ignore it, or at least be passive in the aftermath of death, but he chooses to harness the pain in the weeks after Sam’s passing to ensure their friendship, and their love, does not get swept up in the maelstrom of loss. That when the waves ebb, he has something to buoy him for a lifetime to follow without Sam – for me, that is what will help him to survive and to move forward in life.
For all the loss and reflection in this book, How We Named the Stars would be very difficult to categorise as a ‘tragedy,’ from my own reading. It glows with a redemptive and exalting energy right through to the final pages. Why was it necessary for you, or for the story, to write a book centred around loss and death with an overarchingly nurturing, uplifting tone?
I felt an obligation to Daniel. He became so hyperreal to me that my care and affection was that of a cross between father and friend, and I wanted him to know by the final page that he would survive. I did not want to make it easy, nor water down his grief, but it was vital that his story articulate how we can learn to live with loss when blessed with community and care which allow us to honour all our true emotions. One of the most beautiful experiences so far in my career has been readers reaching out to share how HWNTS has enabled them to acknowledge a grief they carry or reflect on a similar experience. Grief and death are so insurmountable at times, and I didn’t want my novel to add to anyone’s sadness, but rather offer some glimmer of solace or redemption, because I needed that so much at the time of writing the story.
The book is filled with supportive and heartening figures, from Abuelo Omar and Daniel to the elegiac yet guiding figure of Tio Daniel. When so many contemporary queer novels choose to focus on familial rejection and suffering, it’s a refreshing perspective. Why was it important to you to represent a queer joy rooted so deeply in family and landscape?
I think we are living in a time of deep uncertainty, when rights across the globe are up for debate for so many marginalised groups, especially LGBTQIA+ communities. I am now in my mid-thirties, and perhaps I feel responsible for helping the next generation. So many queer people, especially queer men, who are Gen X or Millennials, did not grow up with queer elders because of the rampant loss of the deeply mismanaged AIDS crisis. That our governments robbed us of so much beautiful queer life is unforgivable. So for me, this novel became a way of articulating a queer awakening through what is left behind: our words. For Daniel, it is his uncle’s diary entries and the stories shared by Abuelo Omar that help him through his grief and eventually to reach the end of his story. Beyond that it is found family, such as his friends and Bernie-Bernice, that afford him deep love. But as you say, it’s also the landscape, particularly nature, that ushers Daniel along. It is in these bucolic spaces where he finds freedom to explore his affections and desires for both Sam and Diego. I acknowledge ample darkness in the world, and applaud those writers who masterfully capture it, but for me, my calling is writing to the light so others may live more brightly.
As a writer, one of your main concerns is ‘ni de aquí, ni de allá’ (to be neither here nor there) and this idea is unpacked at length through the character of Daniel de la Luna, navigating his life and heritage between Mexico and the US. I think this idea intersects with queerness and class as much as the notion of diaspora, and complicates each overlapping facet. Can you share a little of why this informs so much of the novel, and your work as a writer more generally?
I am fascinated with all the identities we carry as people at any one time. The ones we are born into, those prescribed to us, and the ones we come to as we gain a sense of self. What is it to be born into a body, and then from day one, learn how strangers can dictate your life for you: what you’re allowed to want, where you’re allowed to live, how you’re allowed to act? And then, what if your being is at odds with those preconceptions? How do you learn to move through the world? For me, growing up American but from a Mexican family, I was constantly othered. I faced quite a bit of racism as a child, especially with the ‘border crisis’ always in the news, and then in my late teens realised I was gay. Which was another form of othering from my immediate world. It was like entering a liminal state without any community to root myself to, and that liminality just echoed across all these different identities I carried. For me, learning to root oneself is such a rich opportunity for storytelling, and Daniel a conduit to do so.
Were there any queer love stories (whether fictional or not) that inspired the writing of this work? Or, conversely, any tropes we sometimes find in popular queer love stories you wanted to avoid, and make your own writing a counterpoint to?
I took a lot of inspiration from André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, Mendez’s Rainbow Milk and Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Each of those novels aches with a kind of grief and mourning, but also are deeply intimate and sexy. I also was reading lots of Edmund White, James Baldwin, and Chistopher Isherwood during the final drafting and edits of the novel. All of these writers imbue a sadness or forlorn quality which rings true with many experiences of queerness. That sense of watching and observing quietly from the margins – an untapped desire. But for me, I did not want this to turn into queer love story informed by trauma or homophobia. This was not to deny these experiences, but for me I wanted a love story that the reader could root for despite knowing on page three that Sam is dead. If there is any trope I am playing with, it is probably queering the friends-to-lovers story and choosing to do it with a character like Sam, who embodies a type of kindness not often portrayed in male characters.
Even before publication, you’ve found incredible success with this novel, as an Observer 2024 Best Debut pick. You also work as a poet; what can we expect from you next? Will you be returning to poetry, continuing with fiction, or something of both?
I am grateful to hold space for both poetry and prose because each offers me something so decidedly different in terms of craft and inspiration. I have been whiling away at my follow-up poetry collection in tandem with HWNTS and hopefully will have news to share on that soon. My poetics have taken on a much more inventive approach with language and form, whilst still really digging into what it is to inhabit a queer body with an earnest interest to speak to other poets across time and culture. In terms of fiction, I am in the midst of reworking novel #2 and relishing the idea of writing a love story that is light on loss and more focused on what it is to build a life and family with someone. The portrayal of queer love and relationships is something I just don’t think I will ever tire of. As the late, great Edwin Morgan wrote, ‘Love is the most mysterious of the winds that blow’, and I plan to let that wind guide me for the rest of my writerly life.
Soula Emmanuel & Andrés N Ordorica will be in conversation with Sasha de Buyl for Edinburgh International Book Festival on Sunday 25th August. Tickets available here.
How We Named the Stars is out now, published by Saraband Books. Available here.
Photo Credit: Daniel McGowan Photography