Amid new-world chaos, she found literary fame

Julia Alvarez was 10 when her sunny life began to spiral.
Her father was linked to an attempt to kill the Dominican Republic dictator. She fled to the U.S. with her parents and sisters. The family was “losing everything,” she told the Television Critics Association. It was a new language and a new culture, with little money or sunshine.
And 30 years later, that would lead to a novel (“How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”) that would bring praise from readers and disagreement within her family. Now she’s the focus of “American Masters,” at 9 p.m. Tuesday (Sept. 17) on PBS.
Adriana Bosch, the director, focused the film on family, which she feels is logical. “We are Latinos. We exist within the boundaries and within the relationships of these families.”
Alvarez, 74, describes her mother as “a product of the dictatorship. They’re known as ‘The Lost Generation’ through the Trujillo dictatorship and then losing everything and coming to this country.”
She kept a close watch on the girls, Alvarez said. “I didn’t understand this (at the time). I just thought, you know, she was another form of dictator.”
The girls found ways to rebel, at the same time that Alvarez was prospering academically. Facing biases, she dug deeper into books and studies. She went to a boarding academy and graduated from Connecticut College, adding a Phi Bets Kappa at Middlebury College and a Master’s Degree at Syracuse. She was a touring artist-in-residence in Kentucky schools, was a published poet and taught in college.
And then, when she was 41, “Garcia Girls” was published. It changed everything, for good – she’s had at least 15 books published, including novels, poems and essays – and bad, with family distress
“Garcia Girls” was fiction, but mirrored her life. “I thought of the mother as a beautifully complicated, rich character,” Alvarez said. Her mother disagreed.
“She didn’t want anything that was badly reflective of the family …. If the girls were hippies and doing wild things” it would reflect on everyone.
Others had mixed feelings, but their comments in the film are moderate. “We’re sisters,” Alvarez said. “We love each other, we could kill each other, we love each other.”