The craft of memoir: queer joy, turtles, and caring for the reader in Edgar Gomez’s ‘Alligator Tears’

Just one day after New York magazine dropped a story package about people secretly subsidizing their Big Apple lives with generational wealth, I took a train into New York City for the book launch of Edgar Gomez's “Alligator Tears,” a memoir-in-essays about a very different experience: growing up poor in Florida. Gomez was joined by bestselling novelist John Manuel Arias (“Where There Was Fire”), who praised Gomez for their ability to make us look at and interrogate class on every page.

In "Alligator Tears," Gomez writes about the many low-wage jobs they worked: as a sales assistant at the Flip Flop Shop, Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, and JCPenney; as an intern at Telemundo; as a receptionist at a bathhouse; and selling bootleg CDs alongside their older brother at a flea market. 

It's a scene Gomez constructs at the flea market that I keep returning to, both as a reader and writer of memoir. 

The scene appears in the memoir's titular essay, which recounts the joy and community Gomez found as a queer person at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, before an attacker stormed into the venue in June 2016 and killed 49 people in one of the worst mass shootings in American history. In the middle of the essay, there's a sudden and brief flashback to the time when Gomez, age 12, purchases a baby turtle at the flea market and attempts to set it free into the world, an episode that recalls an earlier essay in the memoir:

After Gomez’s failed attempt to rescue and release the turtle from its dank, crowded confines, the baby turtle is swooped back up by the pet guy and returned to the tank. "I watched him poke his head out, look up at his siblings, thrashing above him, then retreat into his shell again, regretting having set him free. Maybe it hadn't been so bad before, when all he knew was the water and the island and the fake tree. But now he'd know everything he was missing."

I invited Gomez — who is a friend and also in my writing group — to chat with me about their craft choice in this essay. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So tell me about these turtles.

I'm so touched that the people who have read the book so far, they always talk about this turtle anecdote that, for me, was something that I used to think about constantly as a childhood memory that would make me laugh. Like, Oh, my God, you're so naive and trying to do this good thing! But you didn't really know that the world doesn't always let you. And that it's a lot messier. But I tried. 

It's  a very common thing where in Florida they sell baby turtles. They sell them on the side of the roads. At the flea market where I was working, there was this pet booth, and it was just one of the many, many pets that they had there. The reason that I chose that anecdote was because I was thinking about what I wanted the larger story to say. And it's obviously a story that's about Pulse.

When I was in my early 20s and first started going to Pulse, I, like a lot of people who are in their early 20s, was just dealing with a lot of shame and a lot of insecurities specifically around my queerness. I just felt like I couldn't be myself in a lot of places. I mean, this is Florida; it's still the South. And Pulse was a place where once I discovered it for myself, once I started going with my friends, it was just like letting go of a breath that I didn't realize that I was keeping in. It was this perfect, freeing place where people looked like me, people sounded like me, especially on Latin night.

I could hear the type of music that I dance to. I didn't necessarily have to be afraid, or so I thought. It was a place where I was finally letting go of that shame and learning how to be proud, and learning what it means to be free, and what kind of life I wanted to have. At that age, I guess I was also a little bit naive and optimistic. I was like, "Oh, my God, I found my people. I found my place. This is my happy ending. I'm free."

But again, life doesn't always work out that way.

Just when I am learning how to be unafraid, this man steps into Pulse and kills 49 predominantly Latinx people. And I don't want to say that it took me fully back to that place of shame that I used to live in, but the fear was real. There were a lot of days where I was like, "I don't know that I want to be out anywhere in public. I don't know what's going to happen."

The [turtle] anecdote works so well because it talks about this kind of essential part of who you were that hadn't changed from when you were a kid — this kind of naïveté [that] you could make a change by doing this little thing, then realizing it's more complicated. You're still that Edgar at Pulse. But you're also the turtle, too. You're letting us know, because we have read this whole book up until this point, we've seen all the hardships you faced, all the rejection you endured, [how] now you have this taste of freedom and how sad it would be to have that freedom taken from you, because now you know what it is to feel free. 

Thank you. You just gave me goosebumps.

You said that you had a gut instinct that this was the right place for this anecdote. Was it intentional the way you dropped it in? There was no transition into it, transition out of it, no callback. You love a callback at the end of an essay. No callback to the turtles. There was no turtle scuttling down the sidewalk.

You know that I do love a callback. It's a really effective strategic tool. But I don't think you always need a callback. Sometimes you just have to be confident and let a moment have its moment. And also in a way, it is a callback to something that happens earlier in the book, so in that way, it still scratched that itch. But I think I just wanted to completely come out of the story that I was telling and transport the reader somewhere else for a little bit. 

Though I don't think it's necessarily the saddest story, I did try very hard to insert as much humor or just absurdity or lean into a celebratory voice. I still was like, "The reader needs a 15 right now." That was me trying to give the reader their 15-minute break, and just take them somewhere else where they can sort of relax a little bit into this anecdote. Within the context of the larger story, it's sad, but just reading the anecdote on its own, it's a little bit funny, like, "Oh, my God, this silly little kid was trying to save the turtles."

I like that, this intentional caring for the reader. You can do that so quickly, because we are already familiar with the flea market — we saw it, we know this world. So if you had tried to take us to Alaska or something I don't think it would have worked. The reader would have been lost. We knew the flea market. We know young Edgar.

That's a really good point. I was really inspired by the essay “The Greeter,” by T Kira Madden. She talks about working at [shoe retailer] Steve Madden. And in that essay, she does have an anecdote about — I think it's going fishing with her mom or going fishing — and at the end, she does call back to it. It's such a beautiful, haunting image. It works really well to call back. 

I think I got a lot of inspiration because I'm writing about working at the mall, she was writing about working at the mall. It's one of those essays that I revisited. And I think I took the idea of, you can take the reader out of that present moment and plop them somewhere else, and it can be meaningful, and it can be strategic. I was like, "I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna steal this."

And then I read it and was like, "I'm gonna steal this."

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Minda Honey is the author of the dating memoir "The Heartbreak Years" and writes a weekly newsletter, MID., about the adventures of midlife at mindahoney.substack.com.