PUBLISHERS WEEKLY -- De Robertis is also a translator of Latin American and Spanish literature, the editor of the 2017 anthology “Radical Hope: Letters of Love and Dissent in Dangerous Times,” and a teacher of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. As a child, she moved from England to Switzerland to Los Angeles as her father, the scientist Edward De Robertis, built his career. Coming to the U.S. when she was 10, “from other countries that were not my country of origin,” she says, “I had this feeling and experience of having a country inside my skin that wasn’t outside my skin.”
She went on to attend the University of California, Los Angeles, and moved to the Bay Area in 1997. “I bounced around between San Francisco and Berkeley, following the lower rents at the time, working at different activist jobs, and as a substitute teacher. And then I had this very formative experience in my mid-20s when I was about to marry a woman, the love of my life, with whom I’ve had these two children, and my parents disowned me. One of the things that they said was that I couldn’t be Uruguayan anymore, because I was gay. Because I didn’t exist in their country.
“When I was younger, back when I was writing that first novel, I thought I’d never feel at home anywhere in the world. I thought belonging was just something that would never be fully possible for me,” De Robertis says. “But I’ve built a life in the Bay Area with my wife and kids and with chosen family, and a community that we have forged where there is room for all of us. Because there’s enough openness and possibility for families like mine.”