Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service — including a year of study at the Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires —and completing her MBA at York University (Toronto, Canada), she returned to Buenos Aires to reconnect with her roots. By the mid-1990s, many sons and daughters of the "Disappeared"—the youngest victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in the 1970s —were coming of age and grappling with the fates of their families. She interviewed several of these children, and their experiences, not widely known outside Argentina, inspired her debut novel. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two sons and a spirited terrier.
Clark applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, On a Night of a Thousand Stars, and reported the following:
On page 69 of On a Night of a Thousand Stars, there is a three-sentence paragraph that provides a good glimpse of what the book is about:Visit Andrea Yaryura Clark's website.I thought about Sanchez’s and Professor Torres’s accounts. Dad had built the safe house for a woman. A missing woman. If that was the case, it might explain why he kept the safe house a secret from my mother.I hadn’t heard of this test before and I think my novel passed with flying colors! Those three sentences, in my view, capture the two narrative threads. The first one revolves around the dad (Santiago) and his time as a university student in 1970s Buenos Aires. The second story is narrated by Paloma, whose passage I quote. She’s the daughter of Argentinians Santiago and Lila Larrea and has grown up in New York. After an unexpected appearance of an old friend of her father’s at the family’s summer home, Paloma becomes curious about him as a young man. On page 69, she’s trying to figure out what his involvement might have been during the tumultuous years leading up to the military coup of 1976.
When I moved to New York in the early 2000s, after having lived for almost a decade in Buenos Aires (I also spent a part of my childhood there), I realized there wasn’t enough fiction about this tragic period, especially for readers not from Argentina. My hope is that the reader will follow Paloma along on her journey as she slowly uncovers her family’s secret history and her country of origin’s troubling past.
My Book, The Movie: On a Night of a Thousand Stars.
--Marshal Zeringue
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