Novel set on Jeju and in Seoul
Talking Location With… Jennine Capó Crucet – MIAMI
11th March 2024
#TalkingLocationWith… Jennine Capó Crucet, author of SAY HELLO TO MY LITTLE FRIEND
Book after book, I keep writing about Miami even when I’m trying not to write about Miami. So part of my mission when I began my new novel, Say Hello to My Little Friend, was to attempt to get that city out of my system once and for all by writing what I’ve been jokingly calling the Most Miami Book Ever. Given that aim, I had no choice but to make one of the main characters a failed Pitbull impersonator, because the only thing more Miami than Pitbull is a guy pretending to be Pitbull who then goes on to pretend to be Tony Montana in Scarface (hence the novel’s title).
Rapper Pitbull
Miami is the place where I, like Pitbull, was born and raised. (What else do I have in common with Pitbull? A set of Cuban parents, a predilection for dramatic sunglasses, and a borderline obsession with the “305” (the city’s original area code). That’s where the similarities end, lucky for us both.) But unlike Pitbull, with this new book, I wanted to write about my hometown in an effort to say goodbye to it—from Tropical Park on Bird Road (which, up until recently, was home to a riotous Christmas-inspired theme park called Santa’s Enchanted Forest) to the Hialeah Racetrack (which is, no lie, home to a flock of Cuban flamingos).
I don’t mean “say goodbye” metaphorically: even the most optimistic of predictions about our climate crisis puts most of the city of Miami underwater in my lifetime. I wanted to write a book that people could someday read to get a real sense of what was there aside from the nightclubs and the beaches so readily summoned by most imaginations in response to the word Miami. I wanted to give some clear sense of all that was lost to the rising water: my Miami, “a place of newness and impermanence, where the fluidity of language and culture and history is as central to its identity as the ocean and the tides,” to use fellow-novelist Daniel Alarcón’s description of “the version of Miami [he’s] been waiting to see in literature for years” in Say Hello to My Little Friend.
It turns out that writing such a book required a pretty elemental way in: I had to give in to the flooding—meaning, the book’s narration had to work like water. And if the narration can go anywhere water can go, that means you’ll end up, sooner or later, inside a whale. In Miami, that whale is and always will be Lolita the Killer Whale (not her real name, but the one she went by in Miami), who lived out her life trapped in the Miami Seaquarium, swimming in circles in the smallest whale tank in the world.
The Miami Seaquarium rarely finds itself on touristy lists of places to see in Miami, and for good reason: no one should spend their vacation wandering around a dilapidated marine park that reeks of dead and dying fish. But us locals know it from our poorly-informed childhoods. I went maybe a handful of times as a kid—on school trips purporting to be “educational,” or with family looking to keep us entertained for an afternoon.
That’s likely where my fascination with her began: here was this incredible being that absolutely didn’t belong in this city, and yet Miami had claimed her as its own. You could say the same about the city’s invasive iguanas, who patrol Miami’s canals as intensely as the bouncers blocking a nightclub’s velvet-roped entrance. Those iguanas also get their moment in the sun—both literally and figuratively—in Say Hello to My Little Friend. How could they not, when the water touches them just as it floods over and though us?
Photo: Sun Sentinel
For the same reason, the novel also contains a chapter on Miami’s birds. Like Melville with whaling in Moby-Dick, I wanted in Say Hello to My Little Friend to catalogue everything I knew about Miami, and that meant writing about the four or so kinds of birds I think “count” as legitimate Miami birds – the Pitbulls of Birds, if you will. This strange narrative digression (which makes sense in the novel, I swear) doesn’t at all mention Miami’s most bird-centered theme park, Jungle Island, which used to be called Parrot Jungle Island, which used to be called Parrot Jungle before Hurricane Andrew destroyed it and they relocated to Miami Beach(ish). For that history, the reader has to wait to meet a character who held her wedding at Jungle Island and who also owns a well-endowed dog that deserves a novel all his own.
Perhaps in the end, Say Hello to My Little Friend is a tribute to all the creatures who will thrive once the city is subsumed by the ocean. Pitbull and I cannot count ourselves among them.
Say Hello to My Little Friend is published by Riverrun on 5th March. It is available in Harback, EBook and Audiobook.
Jennine Capó Crucet
Join team TripFiction on Social Media:
Twitter (@TripFiction), Facebook (@TripFiction.Literarywanderlust), YouTube (TripFiction #Literarywanderlust), Instagram (@TripFiction) and Pinterest (@TripFiction) and BlueSky(tripfiction.bsky.social) and Threads (@tripfiction)
Please wait...
