The Best That You Can Do brims with life, sorrow, joy, and nostalgia. Winner of the 2023 Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, Amina Gautier’s short story collection brings readers across time to the present day with stops that include Chicago, Philadelphia, Lisbon, and the author’s own native Brooklyn. The stories are compact yet potent, exploring relationships, the connection and rights to one’s own heritage, and complexities embedded in one’s identity.
This collection, in many ways, feels like a master study on the richness of everyday lives. In “Rerun,” Black and Puerto Rican siblings are desperate for Boricua representation on their television screen. “We’ve got the Evans family – Florida, James, Michael, Thelma, and J.J. a.k.a. Kid Dy-no-mite – but we have to work to find the Boricuas,” Gautier writes. “We collect Puerto Rican actors the way other kids collect comics, valued all the more because they’re so rare.” In “Why Not?” a Black woman struggles with the low dating standards others expect her to accept, and the subsequent fallout after a date with an acquaintance. In “Housegirl,” an elderly woman grapples with loneliness in the space of time between visits from her personal home-care attendant.
Gautier spoke with Latinx in Publishing recently about the inspiration behind The Best That You Can Do (out now from Soft Skull Press), re-exploring Puerto Rican identity, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Amaris Castillo (AC): Congratulations on your stunning book, The Best That You Can Do. Your collection is lyrical and bursts with many themes, including identity, Blackness, and womanhood. I felt like I was right beside your characters as their stories unfolded. You were the inaugural winner of the Soft Skull-Kimbilio Publishing Prize, which is how The Best That You Can Do came to be in readers’ hands. What has winning this prize meant to you?
Amina Gautier (AG): I love winning prizes, first of all [Laughs]. Who doesn’t? The Kimbilio Prize, specifically, is important to me because Kimbilio means ‘safe haven,’ and it is an organization that nurtures and promotes the work of writers from all across the Black diaspora. So it’s a very important award.
Many of the awards for short story collections are typically attached to university presses, which tend to be small independent presses. Having this contest be attached to Soft Skull Press, which is distributed by Penguin Random House and is connected to Catapult, I think, makes the contest even more significant and more visible because it’s a larger press. It’s not one of the Big Six, but it is larger than an independent press which means that it has the power to get the work distributed widely.
But specifically as a writer of short fiction, it’s important to win contests because short fiction or short story collections tend to not be publicized or promoted as widely as novels are. So having a contest win attached to your book is an extra layer of publicity that will make people pay attention to it. All four of my short story collections have been published through contest wins.
AC: You center complexities within the Puerto Rican diaspora in the first section of your book. In “Buen Provecho,” siblings keep their desire to learn their father’s language hidden from their mother so as not to wound her. In “Quarter Rican,” a teenage girl visiting family on the island is made to feel not fully Puerto Rican by a relative. As a writer with Puerto Rican ancestry yourself, I know you have been writing about your community for years. For this collection in particular, though, what truths were you hoping to unearth in re-exploring Boricua identity?
AG: Some of the things that I’m always interested in promoting and exploring with Boricua identity and Latino identity is 1) Constantly reminding people that Puerto Ricans are not immigrants. People seem to keep forgetting that. When I’m writing about Latinx diaspora experiences, I’m interested in pushing the boundaries and reminding readers that there are so many different ways to be Latino or Hispanic.
Even with the narrative that is frequently pushed about languages – like, ‘OK, you know how to speak Spanish because you learned it at home, or because you learned it in school because of exposure.’ But there are plenty of other reasons why a person could decide to forgo speaking the language, or decide to be interested in it. At a certain point in your life, or development, or age, it can become a conscious choice.
In “Buen Provecho,” we have a mother who makes a decision not to learn Spanish because she associates with her father. And we have kids who are not exposed to it in the house because the mothers isn’t exposing it to them. But then they go see their Titi on the weekends, and they can get exposure in other ways and make the choice for themselves.
I want to remind people that that language is not only just a process of education and exposure, but has an emotional and psychological component to it as well… There’s so many different choices that people are making when they are choosing to adopt a language or adapt a language. And I want to remind readers that all of these possibilities are valid and valuable. That we are expansive.
“When I’m writing about Latinx diaspora experiences, I’m interested in pushing the boundaries and reminding readers that there are so many different ways to be Latino or Hispanic. ”
AC: In that vein, your focus on Puerto Rican identity in this collection is deeper than, “Am I Puerto Rican enough?” You cover the complexities and relationships across generations, and also how, for example, that identity impacts a partner who is not Puerto Rican. As you worked on these stories, was there anything that surprised you about the expansiveness of what it means to be Puerto Rican?
AG: All the stories surprised me. I don’t start out with any kind of organization or plan. For instance, “Making a Way” is one of the last stories that I wrote. The collection was accepted at the beginning of January 2023 but I felt that it needed just a few more stories, so I wrote a few more to round it out. In “Making a Way,” I have this wife who is resentful of her husband. I thought I was going to explore her keeping the kids and not letting them go to PR for the summer as a way to punish him, and realizing that this specific character can have one relationship with her husband – but still want an experience for her children.
She would like to have been able to go to Puerto Rico to see her husband’s native land, but just because she can’t she’s not going to deny her children that experience. I didn’t know that that’s what I was going to have her do. Her story is where I started really thinking about language as a form of inheritance, as a form of birthright. That despite what’s happening with her and her husband, her kids have a right to spend time with him, to go to the island, to learn Spanish if they want to. And she’s not going to deny them that experience.
AC: Your collection drips in nostalgia. I loved the many TV show references in “Rerun” and appreciated you placing the reader in the post-summer break frenzy in “Summer Says.” Much of your book is inspired by the 70s and 80s. What was it like to place that time on the page in many of these stories?
AG: It was a lot of fun to go back and think about the cartoons and different shows I was watching, but also about how the pop culture that Gen X kids were exposed to helped shape our identity. Like watching all the cartoons with morals on the end of them… I wanted to make this a love letter to Gen X. I feel like my generation is constantly forgotten. I really wanted to infuse in deep references to that pop culture. We Gen X kids were forced to be immersed in our parents’ lives and music. We had to watch the TV shows that they did, so I also think that it’s one of the last cross-generational moments before people split off and everyone went to their own separate rooms to watch their own separate TV shows.
AC: In the section titled “The Best That You Can Do,” we see more stories about women and their disillusionment with love and with men. We see disappointed women, tired women. The men in many of these stories, fall short of their promises to their partners. In “A Recipe for Curry,” a wife is stuck in a monotonous life – having to cook curry for her husband once a week. She hasn’t been able to realize her dreams, despite her husband’s promises to her. I’d love to learn more about your depiction of hetero-relationships in these stories. What do you want readers to take away from them?
AG: As you know, this section is the longest one in the collection. There’s a whole cycle-of-life going on with the first two sections being about youth and childhood, and then this longer section being about adulthood and adult relationships. And then the next section is about our external lives politically, and the last section is about when we come to the end of our lives.
In this long section about romantic relationships or about adult children’s relationships with their parents, I’m really exploring social pressures and social expectations that are on us when we’re adults. What happens in our relationships based on what our friends or our partners are expecting us to do? How are we navigating the goals and dreams that we have for ourselves as adults, in conjunction with our parents or our partners’ expectations?
In “A Recipe for Curry,” the dream was just to get out of Guyana and to make it to the U.S. That’s more tangible, even though there are other promises: a house, a car, all these moments of exploration. But just getting to the U.S. kind of becomes the focus. And once they’re there, they become stuck in this rut. What part do we play in becoming engineers of our own self-destruction? Because the wife plays a part in that – in continuing to make it for him once a week and not pushing back.
AC: Some of the stories are a few pages long – some only a couple. How do you know when a story is complete? Do you step away from it once you feel you’ve answered a question – or posed one to your reader?
AG: I don’t deliberately try to pose questions. Hopefully they come out organically. I don’t like to be a heavy-handed writer. I do focus on an image, or an issue, or a problem, and then try to follow it through to its natural conclusion. With this collection, I knew that it would all be very short fiction… That meant that I would have to compress a lot of the action, and condense it. I wouldn’t always have time for a scene, so I would have to use language and lyricism to create this sort of narrative pressure to push the story through.
I would know that I was done when I couldn’t do anything else with the language to make the point. Which is a little different from my other collections, which have more traditional-length stories with multiple scenes and more dramatic action. But for this one, the focus is really on the language and the syntax. So once I get this feeling that everything sounds right, then I know that the story is done.
AC: What are you hoping readers take away from The Best That You Can Do?
AG: Besides calling it like my Gen X love letter, I’m also calling it my pandemic book because it wasn’t the collection I was supposed to finish next. I had a whole research leave and I was going to write another collection. The pandemic hit, and I couldn’t focus on writing 25-page stories when the world was in such chaos. For months I didn’t write anything because I was depressed and isolated. I told myself, OK, you can’t write your usual 10-12 hours a day or five days a week, but maybe you can write two days a week. Maybe you can’t write a 25-page story. Maybe you can write a four-page story… I used that to kind of write myself out of the depressive environment of a pandemic. I was just thinking, nobody knows exactly what to do right now. We don’t have guidance. We’re just all trying to do the best that we can do – which is why that’s the title of the collection.
In addition to hoping that readers enjoy the pop culture moments and think about the ways in which characters help undermine their own destinies, I want this book to be inspirational. Because I’ve told myself, OK, it doesn’t matter that I didn’t complete the project that I set out to complete. It just matters that I kept writing. And this is what came out of it. I hope that when readers or aspiring writers who get stuck in a project, they can remember that, ‘Maybe this project isn’t working right now. But as long as I just keep writing, I can write something else. I can change genres for a couple of months. As long as I keep writing, there’s hope and there's promise. And what I do is valuable.’
Amina Gautier, Ph.D., is the author of three short story collections: At-Risk, Now We Will Be Happy, and The Loss of All Lost Things. Gautier is the recipient of the Blackwell Prize, the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s 21st Century Award, the International Latino Book Award,the Flannery O’Connor Award, and the Phillis Wheatley Award in Fiction. For her body of work, she has received the PEN/MALAMUD Award for Excellence in the Short Story.
Amaris Castillo is an award-winning journalist, writer, and the creator of Bodega Stories, a series featuring real stories from the corner store. Her writing has appeared in La Galería Magazine, Aster(ix) Journal, Spanglish Voces, PALABRITAS, Dominican Moms Be Like… (part of the Dominican Writers Association’s #DWACuenticos chapbook series), and most recently Quislaona: A Dominican Fantasy Anthology and Sana, Sana: Latinx Pain and Radical Visions for Healing and Justice. Her short story, “El Don,” was a prize finalist for the 2022 Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers’ Prize by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival. She is a proud member of Latinx in Publishing’s Writers Mentorship Class of 2023 and lives in Florida with her family.
