“I don’t know what my husband and I will say to our children one day. I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to place and edit out for them, and which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version—even though plucking, shuffling, and editing sounds is probably the best summary of what my husband and I do for a living. But the children will ask, because asking is what children do. And we’ll need to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. We’ll need to give them an answer, tell them a proper story.” 

The mother contemplates the fact that she and her husband will need to give their children “a beginning, a middle, and an end” because she seems to understand that the end of her marriage is soon to come. Therefore, her children will expect their origin story—their family’s beginning—to contain some foreshadowing explanation of their family’s ending. From the very beginning, the main mother narrator slips into a removed, extra-diegetic tone that gestures to the novel’s structure (its “beginning, middle, and end”). In other words, she simultaneously gestures to the narrative “beginning” she’s trying to offer her children and the narrative “beginning” Valeria Luiselli is trying to offer the reader of the book. This opening establishes the novel’s overarching interest in examining the ways fictive storytelling—and the stories we tell ourselves about others’ lives—strangely mirrors and echoes nonfiction, history, and the subjective “truth” of personal experience.

“The children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us. They want to know everything about when the two of them became our children, and we all became a family. They’re like two anthropologists studying cosmogonic narratives, with a touch more narcissism. The girl asks to hear the same stories over and over again. The boy asks about moments of their childhood together, as if they had happened decades ago. So we tell them. We tell them all the stories we’re able to remember. Always, if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time. So we rewind the tape in our minds and play it again from the beginning.”

The mother narrator elaborates upon the children’s need for a story of their family’s “beginning,” comparing these stories to “cosmogonic narratives”: stories about the origins of Earth, the universe, and life itself. Her reference to “rewinding” introduces the thematic motif of