Libertad Meets Best Video

High school senior Libertad’s brother, Maynor, is dead. As her family sorts through his room, she wonders: ​“How long can a space hold a memory?” 

His memory is everywhere. She walks to the corner store and hears how Maynor once started a massive running tab for all the neighborhood boys to charge for food.

That was when Bessie Flores Zaldívar interrupted themself, addressing the audience directly: ​“That’s actually something my brother did do. He was, like, thousands of lempiras in debt because he was feeding the whole neighborhood.”

The scene dissolved for a minute, and Wednesday’s cozy, intimate crowd at Best Video Film Cultural Center in Hamden came into focus.

Zaldívar was reading from their debut young adult novel, Libertad, set thousands of miles away in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 2017. 

On the six-month anniversary of their book’s original publication, Zaldívar was trying again: rereading the same passage they sobbed through at their launch in New York. Zaldívar wrote those two chapters in Connecticut in 2024, as they were living right by Best Video. The reading felt like the perfect full-circle moment.

The novel is semi-autobiographical. But don’t confuse Zaldívar with their protagonist. For one, Zaldívar’s own brother is still very much alive.

Zaldívar said they didn’t intend to kill off Libertad’s brother. But in a workshop class a fellow student had asked: What’s this character most scared of? What would break this character? ​“And I knew immediately that this was a book where I did have to break my character’s heart,” Zaldívar said. Maynor would have to go.

Zaldívar opted for a novel rather than a memoir because they said they worried about their story becoming an anthropological device, generalized to speak to the experience of being gay in Honduras. ​“I wanted it not to be treated like a documentary,” they added. ​“I wanted it to be treated like a work of art.”

Zaldívar alluded to a universal truth of fiction: It can be hard for readers not to slip into thinking about novels as representative of the author’s own lives. That conflation is often more prevalent with authors of color. Zaldívar recounted readers asking them questions about their book’s characters and addressing them as ​“you” or ​“your mom” or ​“your grandma.”

There’s even a disparity, Zaldívar pointed out, in the kinds of questions writers get asked: White authors often field questions about craft, while authors of color are asked about how they relate personally to the material they’ve covered. 

Zaldívar, who uses any pronouns, felt like they were writing for a teenager somewhere out there like them. Born in Honduras, they navigated the inextricably linked forces of political turmoil and queerness while being raised in a woman-run household. 

“I was asking for permission to break rules for so long,” Zaldívar said, as a young queer person. ​“Now I get to give it.”

It was only when they came to the United States for college that they began writing the novel grounded in their home country.

“The writing part of it wasn’t as hard as the part where I knew I would one day share it with the world,” they told the crowd. ​“I felt kind of jealous. I didn’t want to share it in some ways for a moment there — it had been so mine for so many years.”

It surprised me to learn that sharing doesn’t necessarily come easily to Zaldívar. They radiate a kind of warmth and openness. Maybe it was their pink color-coordinated sweater and sneakers. Maybe it’s their quick sense of humor and easy smile. Regardless, they seemed approachable and perceptive — and unafraid to joke about it.

“I can always tell even before a friend or a loved one tells me when they have read the book because they start acting just a little different for a few days,” Zaldívar said. ​“And I can also always tell when they haven’t read the book, and they feel guilty about that, and they think that I’m going to bring it up.” 

While many of their MFA program peers focused on writing adult literary fiction, Zaldívar felt drawn to the young adult genre. They said they believe that writing for teenagers demands leaving young readers better than they were before reading the book — that authors have to offer them more than adult readers of literary fiction. 

“You owe teenagers more. You owe them hope,” Zaldívar said. ​“And that’s hard to do — because how do you find hope at times?”

The past decade has been hugely influential in creating new stories of hope for queer young people. Novels like Simon vs. the Homo Sapien Agenda (2015) or Red, White, and Royal Blue (2019) have been so widely read they’ve been adapted into successful films. But many of these stories revolve around gay men. And most of those men are white. There is still a lack of popular young adult stories revolving around queer women, much less queer women of color. 

On Wednesday night at Best Video, the heaviness of this void existed somewhere else. Inside, the air was warm, the room dimly lit. Listeners existed somewhere in space and time, between Honduras and Hamden, 2017 and present day. 

Three of Zaldívar’s former students from Quinnipiac University attended the reading. Two seniors who had taken Advanced Fiction Writing with them in the fall shared their excitement to have an instructor actively pursuing the craft that they loved, rather than ​“like a 100-year-old professor.” They emphasized the realness of what Zaldívar was doing and how much it inspired them.

Zaldívar said they tried to impart a persistent confidence to their students, many of whom are queer. ​“Insist on your obsessions. Insist on your interests,” they said. ​“Insist whatever story you have to tell is worth telling.”