Trisha Low in Conversation with Lara Mimosa Montes

After the release of my last book, I heard from Lara over email and it thrilled me. I had known of Lara, and although we had never met, I knew of her pervasively, like I couldn’t remember a time where I didn’t know of that presence. I admired her work very much and thought of it as intimidating and critically sharp. What she emailed me was so generous and funny and brusque. And when I met her in Minneapolis a few months later she was wearing sweatpants and neon socks with cute Sven sandals. I was on tour—exhausted and high from being in a different place every day for two whole weeks and leery about having to perform socially, but my fears were wholly unnecessary because eating breakfast at a diner with Lara was easy. It was easy because everything about Lara is refreshingly matter-of-fact—she’s not shy about pulling back the veil of professional euphemism or politeness. The only way I can describe Lara is that she is frighteningly lucid. Her ability to be comprehensively observant—to see the full landscape of something and yet able to fish out its particularities, its reticent and often contradictory truths, is a rare and complicated skill set.