When Xochitl Gonzalez turned 40, she’d already made it.
She was a Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn who’d gone to Brown University and she’d had multiple successes as an entrepreneur in New York City, working for the Clio Awards, running small businesses and a marketing consulting firm.
Then she reinvented herself as a writer – and made it on a whole different level. Her debut novel, “Olga Dies Dreaming,” was a bestseller in 2022, and her “Brooklyn Everywhere” column for The Atlantic was a Pulitzer finalist for commentary the following year.
Gonzalez’s new novel, “Last Night in Brooklyn,” is narrated by a Puerto Rican Brooklynite named Alicia, who looks back at the heady days of 2007 when she was still in her 20s and working in advertising.
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Alicia gets caught up in the swirl of La Garza, a local fashionist designer who has become an enigmatic icon, the Jay Gatsby of the Fort Greene neighborhood, which was about to be changed forever; its residents and businesses are being forced out for a new arena, an ugly mall and luxury apartments.
The book is framed by the final night of Freddy’s, a bar that had been in the neighborhood for decades.
Gonzalez, who lived in Fort Greene for 20 years, spoke recently by video about those days and how her world fits into the book and vice versa. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. I was reading your book on the subway last night, and a woman told me how much she loves your books.
Oh my God, that is the best compliment. When I started writing, I really wanted to be good enough to bother schlepping on the subway.
Q. Who do you picture as your reader?
I grew up in Brooklyn and my family’s Puerto Rican, but I went to Brown for college, and was working in this professional environment that nobody in my family understood.
I’d met a lot of people like me at school. But I never saw them in books. When I started to write my first novel, I pictured someone Latina. But then I started thinking about anybody that went from one world into another, particularly with that socioeconomic class thing – growing up in a family that has one set of values and then living in this other world.
There’s always that split in a sense of self, and there are different points of reconciliation. That’s who I’m always writing to.
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In the book, La Garza has the audacity to be really creative and then to take this leap on the business side. But it’s so rough. As talented as La Garza is, there are areas where she’s out of her depth because they’re operating in a different language, and she doesn’t even know enough to know they’re operating in a different language.
My businesses survived the recession, and we’d be getting profiled in bridal magazines, but we were living on a line of credit because all my clients had been at Bear Stearns but lost their jobs. It was a lot of stress. It was so important to me that at some point La Garza’s credit card got declined. But I didn’t make it a major scene; it’s just the fact that she’s a mere mortal like the rest of us.
Q. One big difference between you and Alicia is that you grew up in a politically oriented family. How much does that inform your fiction?
Way more than I would like to tell my mother that it does. My mom is like a full-on socialist; she said, “I hope you didn’t vote for Mamdani, that pseudo-socialist, he’s a bourgeois in disguise.” She ran for vice president of the United States for the Socialist Workers’ Party in 1984. She was often out on the road, which is why I lived with her parents.
My grandparents were good union members, Democrats who would go to rallies and get out the vote. They weren’t political like my mom, but labor was always on our minds.
Maybe it was a bit of a rebellion, but I’ve always really liked nice things. I always loved going with my aunt to Bergdorf Goodman, and then I did luxury event planning, which my family thought was the weirdest thing in the world. So I know a lot of people who also have money and they don’t have horns under their hair. But that doesn’t mean working people aren’t getting screwed. So I try taking a pragmatic approach to how characters see life.
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Q. The story starts after a major change for the narrator, who’s looking back at all this partying and living large, but there’s a sense of gathering gloom, in part because it’s 2007. It reminded me of “The Great Gatsby.”
It was definitely a “Gatsby”-inspired project. I was thinking of stories reliant on their male perspective and immediately thought about “Gatsby” and about Nick and how he’s such a male narrator, because he keeps things close to the vest – details slip out, but he doesn’t let them go easily. And I thought, “A Puerto Rican woman from Brooklyn would give you so much more information. She’d take you on 17 side journeys.”
Fitzgerald didn’t know about the crash that was coming, and I’m writing with this hovering villain. And Alicia also comments from a few years later about all these other changes, like social media and how all we do is look at our phones and how there was such a freedom then. So I also left space for all the other ways things would get more ominous.
Q. The last night of Freddy’s is a framework, but Freddy’s moved to a new neighborhood, where it has survived. Since you write about Brooklynites being resilient, did you consider adding that in?
I agree about that, but it was the close of an era for Fort Greene. We’ve lost 200,000 Black New Yorkers in the last 20 years, and there’s been a demographic and artistic shift. Now the working stiffs are white-collar people. Brooklyn has reinvented itself, and there’s still really cool stuff, and I don’t want to diminish it, but that was a turning point where it became more luxurious and I mourn that loss
Q. You’re capturing a moment where Brooklyn’s upswing is right about to crash. How much are you in there, factually and emotionally?
This book is mostly emotionally autobiographical. A friend who met me much later was talking about how in 2015 I used to do tarot readings in front of my house on weekends in Fort Greene, getting the foot traffic from the Brooklyn Flea. I’d meet all the weirdos in the neighborhood. I said that was my La Garza phase, but when I first got to Fort Greene, I was in my Alicia phase. It’s a pastiche.
I had been writing my “Brooklyn Everywhere” column for the Atlantic, but got to the point where I didn’t want to be the Puerto Rican Andy Rooney, always complaining about everything changing. I wanted to put that to bed. So I thought that artistically I could get it out of my system with this book about how I felt back then, and now I can move on and look to the future.
Xochitl Gonzalez discusses “Last Night in Brooklyn” with Justina Machado
When: 7 p.m., April 27
Where: Skylight Books, 1818 N. Vermont Ave.
Information: www.skylightbooks.com/event/skylight-xochitl-gonzalez-presents-last-night-brooklyn-w-justina-machado