I was a first-generation college student as well as the first in our family to be born in America - my parents were born in Cuba - and we didn't yet know that families were supposed to leave pretty much right after they unloaded your stuff from the car.

People really saw themselves in a big way in Elian Gonzalez's story.

I used to work for a non-profit organization where I worked as a mentor and a counselor to first-generation college student and they kept asking me 'What can I read to try to know what I'm about to be in for,' and while I did have some good suggestions, I figured... I don't know that that book is out there, and that's sort of why I had to write it.

You leave home, and then when you come back, you have a kind of perspective that you didn't have before that in some way problematizes your relationship with your family. You just start to be able to have a sort of double vision about them and who they are and how you grew up that can be really painful.

I remember being so homesick and realizing that where I came from was not something that existed in the cultural imagination outside the city. People used to think Miami was just partying in South Beach all the time.

My parents were more surprised that I wanted to go away for school than anything. They didn't really understand the benefits.

When I left for college, my mom really latched on to the dog; She started buying him little outfits and calling him our brother, but that's as far as it got.

I have not been to Cuba, though if you count the stories my grandma told me growing up, I've been there in my head many times. I think someday I will see it, when things are different there, but I've come to feel like I really am a Miami girl.

My husband is a huge source of support and love.

I really started considering myself a writer when I was about seven or eight years old. I wrote stories from my dreams and kept them all in a notebook that I still have.