Pretend You’re Dead And I Carry You arrives as a novel that stitches personal grief to collective memory. Julián Delgado Lopera maps two intertwined lives — a father, Ignacio, and his daughter, Valentina — against the restless backdrop of 1990s Bogotá. The book moves across decades and moods using a hybrid linguistic texture: Spanglish becomes not simply a stylistic choice but a cultural lens that shapes identity, intimacy, and memory. Readers travel between the intimacy of an apartment full of decaying plants and the charged communal spaces of the underground, encountering questions about gender, depression, and what it means to inherit desires someone else refused to live.
At its heart, the novel asks what happens when queerness is denied by one generation and how that denial ripples through descendants. Lopera threads a broader story of resistance by anchoring his characters to a travesti lineage that the text traces back across centuries. He calls attention to a violent colonial origin — the drowning of early trans people in the Magdalena River by Spanish colonizers — to argue that contemporary struggles are entangled with history. The result is a work that reads as family chronicle, oral history, and elegy.
Language as architecture: the role of Spanglish
Lopera’s use of Spanglish is deliberate and textured. He describes this idiom as a formative way he learned English after moving to the United States at a young age and living first in Miami; the mixture of tongues became his natural register. In the novel, Spanglish functions like a third character: it carries cultural codes, queer slang, and migratory memory all at once. Lopera treats it with the same legitimacy a writer might grant to French or Italian in a text set abroad, refusing to overjustify its presence. Beyond aesthetics, the language choice honors the creativity that immigrant and queer communities deploy to name their worlds, and it ties Bogotá’s specific queer lexicon to broader diasporic practices.
How bilingual voice shapes intimacy
The book’s voice blends tenderness and sharp comedic timing, reflecting the ways bilingual speakers pivot for emphasis or emotional clarity. Lopera also spent significant time researching oral histories in Colombia and speaking with trans people whose experiences are often undocumented in print. That research informs the novel’s glossary of gestures, terms, and registers: the speech of a travesti matriarch, the banter at a queer club, the private silences of a man slipping into olvido — a form of forgetfulness that becomes both refuge and wound. These linguistic choices propel character psychology and anchor scenes in social reality.
Family, lineage, and the burden of secrecy
The narrative pivots between Ignacio’s inward collapse and Valentina’s navigation of adolescence under his shadow. Lopera reimagines his own upbringing in Colombia to populate the novel: the city’s televisual culture, the pressures of a Catholic education, and the omnipresent social violence that shaped the era. Ignacio’s repression — a masculinity enforced by fear and shame — becomes generative of patterns that Valentina inherits. Lopera explores the mechanics of transmission: not only genes or behavior, but emotional climates and silences that calcify across generations. The book insists that these are collective dynamics rather than isolated pathologies.
Ancestral threads and travesti power
Crucially, Lopera expands the idea of inheritance beyond bloodlines to a lineage of travesti elders. The character Tía Mama, a fierce and tender matriarch in the novel, draws on personal memory: Lopera based aspects of her voice and presence on his trans mother, Adela Vázquez, a Cuban immigrant who was an influential figure in his life and who passed away two years ago. Through Tía Mama and the memory of spaces like Club Aquario, Lopera connects intimate caregiving to a longer history of queer survival and authority. He argues for an ancestry that is spiritual, cultural, and communal.
Form, research, and the writer’s stance
Formally, the book departs from linearity; Lopera chose a braided structure to mirror how memory and history loop back on the present. A prologue situates transness within colonial frames, setting a tonal pressure that informs the rest of the novel. Lopera also reflects on his identity as a transmasculine writer who refuses the burden of representing an entire community; he emphasizes storytelling over advocacy, privileging narrative complexity and emotional truth. Still, he aims to move readers: he wants them to feel the ache of these lives, to linger in the grief and the tenderness without demanding tidy resolutions. As he puts it in conversation, he prefers to take readers deep into feeling rather than offering consolation.
Pretend You’re Dead And I Carry You is out May 26 via Liveright. The novel invites readers into a world where language, family, and ancestral defiance converge, asking us to reckon with what is passed down and what can be reclaimed.