Interview of Nicky Gonzalez by Freya Bennett
From the very first page, Mayra grips like a fever dream. Set in the lush, decaying swamplands of Florida, Nicky Gonzalez’s debut is a haunting exploration of memory, desire, and the intoxicating pull of old friendships. Long-listed for the 2025 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, Mayra follows Ingrid as she reunites with her childhood best friend for a weekend that quickly spirals into something far stranger and more unsettling. We spoke with Gonzalez about writing obsession, channeling gothic unease, and why the Everglades were the only place this story could unfold.
Hi Nicky, how are you? How are you feeling now Mayra is out in the world?
Thanks for asking! It’s been a lovely week. I had my book launch this past Tuesday at my local bookstore and it was beautiful. So many friends and family and even regulars from the café I worked at showed up. I feel overwhelmed with love. I also feel immense relief because there’s nothing I can do now. The book is out there and I have to let go.
Mayra has such an intoxicating sense of place, the Everglades almost feels like its own character. What drew you to set the story in the Florida swamplands, and how did that environment shape the narrative?
I grew up in South Florida, near Miami, and it’s a place that demands to be written about. The heat and the subtropical flora bleed into the highly manicured, more urban spaces. I didn’t spend much time in the actual Everglades as a kid. Much like Ingrid, I’d drive down Alligator Alley—an eighty-mile stretch of highway that cuts through the Everglades—and become mesmerized. When I decided to set the house in the Everglades, I really wanted to get it right. I started to go into the parks every time I visited family in Florida. I sloshed through the cypress swamp. I went on tours through the northern half of the Everglades—Shark River Valley and Big Cypress—and found so much inspiration in the ecology and geology of this truly singular place. Without saying too much, a key aspect of the supernatural nature of the house was inspired by an ecological feature of the Everglades.
The relationship between Ingrid and Mayra is magnetic, unsettling, and painfully real. Did you draw from personal experiences of intense female friendships, or were these characters born entirely from imagination?
I’ve been on both sides of that kind of intense and uneven friendship, so I was able to draw from experience in both directions. While the specifics of their lives and the things they get up to were all imagined, what mattered to me was that grain of emotional truth. I’d ask, “Does this feel like something Ingrid and Mayra would do?” and, “If this did happen, what would Ingrid be feeling, and how would that color her interpretation of events?” There’s also a little bit of me in every character I write, I think, but especially in Mayra and Ingrid. Some of that complexity, that love and hate intermingling, comes from my love and hate relationship with myself. Is that too real?
There’s a kind of gothic sensibility at play in Mayra, lush decay, blurred identities, danger cloaked in beauty. Were you consciously channeling the southern gothic tradition as you wrote?
Certainly the gothic tradition, particularly Shirley Jackson’s work. I love every scene and sentence of Haunting of Hill House, which was a huge influence on this book. In Hill House, we’re so close to Eleanor and we see the way her anxious mind animates every interaction, making small moments terrifying or thrilling. I wanted to create that kind of thrill with Ingrid. I also wanted to play with the Gothic trope of the big weird house simply because it’s fun. Exploring and growing the house in my head made me feel like a kid again, when everything was new and anything was possible. As for the southern gothic specifically, that was less intentional. (Though I adore the great Florida novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.) The way lushness and decay intermingle emerged naturally as I wrote about the Everglades.
Time and memory feel slippery in this novel, Ingrid losing her grip on both as the weekend progresses. Why was that important to explore, especially in the context of old friendships?
I think that with a few exceptions, memories naturally erode every time we replay them in our heads. As a result, we tend to mythologize people who were important to us. We remember our misinterpretations as things that were literally said, we shrink and expand and even completely imagine things to serve our biases. Over time, a memory can become so warped that it looks nothing like the original, but it ends up supplanting the original anyway. Being around an old friend can be disorienting to your sense of time and memory even without any supernatural meddling, and I hope the book conveys a supercharged version of that. I wanted to explore the gaps between Ingrid’s memory of Mayra, her projection of what present-day Mayra might be like, and what Mayra is actually like.
The house in Mayra is disorienting and strangely alive, a perfect setting for psychological unravelling. Was it inspired by a real place, or something more symbolic?
It grew from a combination of inspirations. Living in New England now, where houses are much older than the ones I grew up in, I encounter a lot of strange features that New Englanders find normal. I was so charmed but also creeped out by these hundred-year-old creaky houses with so many weird little outdated features. I thought it would be fun to turn the dial up on that. I was also inspired by the odd architectural choices you see in some McMansions where the design is so unintuitive it seems like no humans were involved in the making. My love of liminal spaces also seeped into the writing. I love a maze, I love a pocket universe, anything in media that jumbles up space and time.
You’ve published in such a wide range of venues, from McSweeney’s to Taco Bell Quarterly. What did Mayra allow you to say or do that felt different from your shorter work?
Ingrid was with me for years so I really got to know her on a level that I hadn’t yet reached with one of my characters. The way she saw the world seeped into my daily life. I’d see things and simultaneously interpret them as myself and as Ingrid. I also had to consider that the reader would be spending loads of time with Ingrid. I asked myself what I could do with in the span of sixty-thousand words that would be impossible to do in a short story. With all that space, I was able to both trap the reader in Ingrid’s thought spirals and slowly change the tenor of her narration over time. The reader gets to see her slow unraveling and adjust to it like a frog in warming water. A twenty-page story wouldn’t allow for that kind of gradual change. The shifts in Ingrid’s narration would feel too jarring.
