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Michael Collina: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Michael Collina, and with me today is the author of Ben and Beatriz, Katalina Gamarra. Welcome, Katalina.
Katalina Gamarra: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited.
MC: I am so excited too. And I'm so thrilled to get the opportunity to chat with you, specifically, Katalina, because our own story goes back to our college days. Listeners, Katalina and I actually went to university together. So we go way back. We studied abroad in London together. We had classes together. So, I am so thrilled that you are a debut author now.
KG: Yeah, it's crazy. And that means you've seen me in all of my Shakespeare-obsession glory.
MC: I'm pretty sure we took a Shakespeare seminar together, actually. So as soon as I heard the premise of this story, I was like, "I'm sold. It's Katalina, it's Shakespeare, I'm in."
KG: I'm sure the English faculty are like, “No one is surprised by this." [Laughs]
MC: I was like, "This is so Katalina." And I am so thrilled that listeners are gonna get to experience it too. So, for those of you who don't yet know, Ben and Beatriz is a Latinx retelling of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. But in this retelling, there's a white, wealthy, and privileged son of Trump voters who falls for a queer, biracial first-generation immigrant. It ultimately unfolds into a complex look at race, colorism, passing, class, wealth, sexuality, trauma, and privilege. And, as I mentioned, it's also Katalina's debut.
KG: Yeah.
MC: So, having studied in the same department and having taken a number of classes together, including that Shakespeare seminar, I know your love of literature firsthand, Katalina. And on top of this being a retelling of Much Ado About Nothing, Ben and Beatriz is also filled to the brim with other references to some of your other favorite pieces of literature. Just to name a few, there's Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, and The Hate You Give. And Ben and Beatriz are both book nerds in their own right. So, I needed to ask: How did you narrow down your favorites and pick the ones that ultimately got woven into this story and your own writing?
KG: Oh, that's a good question. It was very organic. Like, I didn't at any point sit down and think, "Okay, I'm going to take these favorite books of mine and weave them in." I was trying to get a draft out. I wrote it right at the beginning of the 2020 lockdown. I was just thinking, "Okay, I need something for them to bond over. What's something that I know a lot about that I don't need to put a lot of research into before I write it into the story?" And I thought Pride and Prejudice and, specifically, the annotated Pride and Prejudice because I'm obsessed with the annotated editions of those books. I was writing a scene, and I think both very methodically and very organically when I write. I remember I was thinking, "Well, I need them to bond. In terms of the trajectory of the story, this is a point where they need to bond. What's something they can bond over?” And so that's how Pride and Prejudice got in there.
"'What's something that I know a lot about that I don't need to put a lot of research into before I write it into the story?' And I thought Pride and Prejudice."
And then, as I continued writing the story, I realized that there were a lot of Pride and Prejudice overlaps in the story anyway. I remember my first conversation ever with my agent, before I had signed with her, I said, "I'm not sure the title is very catchy. It's just Ben and Beatriz, it's kind of boring." And she was like, "Oh, no, I think it's great because Ben and Beatriz sounds like Pride and Prejudice." And I was mind-blown. I did not do that on purpose.
MC: I love it when things like that happen and they just work so well.
KG: Yeah. Yeah. A similar thing with Ulysses. I remember toward the end of the editing process, my editor was like, "Can we try to have a scene of Beatriz in class? Because it's a college novel, but we haven't ever really seen her in classes." And I thought, "Sure." And so I hemmed and hawed about what class it was going to be and what they were going to be studying. And I thought, "I don't really want to have it be a Shakespeare because then I would, as a reader, think, “They're studying Shakespeare, but they're reliving a Shakespeare story and they don't realize that. That's odd."
And Ulysses is my favorite book of all time. I definitely feel like I'm in the minority being a brown woman who loves Ulysses. And so I really wanted to write that into the story and write Beatriz being a brown woman who loves Ulysses and is very knowledgeable about it, and it's a book that really resonated with her. So, I wrote the books into the story either for ease, because I didn't feel like doing research, or because I really wanted to up some representation that I hadn't been seeing.
MC: And it works so well. I'm such a book nerd, as you remember. I just loved it. They know their stuff. They are constantly referencing all of these classics and all of their favorites. And I'm like, "This is what I do. This is what my friends do." This is every English major's dream. Actually, Ben's love of Jane Austen is one of my favorite parts of his character, even when it's kind of a secret. What made you choose Jane Austen, specifically? I know you said the title and your influences, but what was it about Jane Austen that made her the perfect author to be the centerpiece of this story and Ben and Beatriz's story?
KG: At the beginning of the story, Ben is kind of difficult. You know, he really grows throughout the story. I thought a lot about Emma in that regard, and I tried to make his trajectory similar in that, at the beginning, Emma does a lot of questionable things and she's not the kindest person. And then throughout the story and throughout her relationships with the people she loves, she grows and genuinely becomes a good person and wants to be a good person.
So, with Ben, I was like, well, I need to write this guy realistically. And to write him realistically, he's going to make a lot of people angry [laughs]. And so if I'm going to have that aspect of his character, what is something that could be very endearing about him that is unusual, that will help people sympathize with what he's going through? And I thought, you would never expect a douchey WASP-y guy to be in love with Jane Austen, let's try that. And then it worked! Because Jane Austen is such a brilliant character writer. There's a reason her work has stood the test of time. Someone as literarily obsessed as Ben, I think, would really see through all of the unfortunately internalized misogyny there is around Jane Austen and be able to see, "Oh, no, she is really funny and she is really smart and these books are great." Because Beatriz wouldn't have the same baggage he has around Jane Austen, she just falls in love with her immediately.
MC: I love it. Switching back over to Shakespeare, what inspired the retelling of Much Ado About Nothing?
KG: Boredom, to be honest. It was just a random night in 2019. I was like, "I've had a few glasses of wine. I feel like rewatching my favorite adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing"—because I am nerdy enough to have a favorite one. It's a filmed theatrical production from 2011 with David Tennant and Catherine Tate. And I love it so much that I thanked it in the acknowledgements of Ben and Beatriz.
And I was watching it and I was just thinking, "How would I adapt this if I wanted to adapt this?" Because for a lot of college, I was actually a theater major. And I ended up graduating with an English major, but theater was still a very significant part of how I formed as a writer. When you're adapting Shakespeare, you always come from a theme. And so I was watching this production and thinking, "Okay, well, if I were to adapt this as a production or as a story, how would I do that? And what are the themes and how could I make it relevant?” Because I think it's so important to keep Shakespeare alive and keep making him relevant because his stories really, really are.
I thought, well, it would be really interesting if it was in 2019. The political divide is very relevant and is something that we are all struggling with. And it would be very interesting and very dramatic if the reason Benedick and Beatriz cannot get together is because one of them comes from one side of the political divide and the other comes from the other side. The thing with Benedick and Beatriz is they have such intense chemistry in the play and they are constantly talking about how much they hate each other to the point where everyone is like, "We know you're in love with each other and you're so annoying about it." And so I thought there has to be something really, really intense that is keeping them apart. And what is something that is that strong that would keep them apart? And I was like, "Well, if Ben comes from Trump voters and Beatriz is affected by Trump voters, that's a big thing that would be really hard to get around."
MC: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's still a big thing that's very much in the cultural conversation and that people are still thinking and speaking about. So you definitely hit the nail on the head there, because that's definitely the issue that would do it.
KG: Yeah.
MC: I'm also so glad you brought up your author's acknowledgements because I have to say, I started to tear up while reading that. I was also totally inspired to watch that David Tennant and Catherine Tate version of Much Ado About Nothing. And it's incredible, so thank you for that.
KG: It is so funny. Even if you don't get Shakespeare, you will find it funny. I was nannying a girl while I was editing Ben and Beatriz. I showed her that production, and she wanted to watch it every day. And she was seven.
MC: Even though Ben and Beatriz is a funny, feel-good romance at heart, it also doesn't shy away from a lot more serious subject matters. There are deep dives on identity, on class, trauma, addiction, and racism threaded throughout the entire story. And on top of it all, there's also some really great queer and neurodivergent representation too. So, I wanted to ask, how did you balance all of these hard-hitting themes with some of those more comedic and lighthearted moments that drove the plot forward?
KG: I was thematically really inspired by the TV show The Good Place. Something I think is so brilliant about The Good Place is that it is so deep. The Good Place is a sitcom by the creator of The Office and Parks & Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. So, it's a sitcom, but it's about philosophy. Like, intense human moral philosophy. And it is so entertaining and it is so funny and you don't realize that you're absorbing all of this deep information. And I thought that is such a brilliant thing to do because it can be appealing to people who just wanna watch a funny sitcom or it can be appealing to people who are philosophy nerds.
And so when I was thinking about how to balance it, I really thought a lot about The Good Place and how that show worked and why it worked for me. A lot of those issues that you mentioned—not all of them, but a lot of them—are very personal to me and were issues that I hadn't seen explored in the way that I had experienced them. And so representation was a big part of that for me, but I also didn't want to overwhelm anyone. I wanted the book to be readable and fun. And so I thought, I want to try really hard for all of the intense moments I have, and I need to be really accurate and authentic and truthful about those moments as well. But for all of those moments, I really want to balance it with something light so that you're not halfway in and you're like, “I have no feelings left and I cannot finish this book."
"I want to try really hard for all of the intense moments I have, and I need to be really accurate and authentic and truthful about those moments as well."
Life is a balance, you know. I have experienced trauma in my life, but my life has not been terrible. I've also experienced a lot of love and a lot of joy.
MC: Yeah. And thank you so much for sharing that, those pieces of your story and of your life and those experiences, which are very, very difficult and hard to talk about and hard to write about.
KG: Thank you. Yeah. I think representation is so important, especially for trauma survivors, because it's not just that trauma's not often talked about, it's also that a lot of the time, for trauma survivors, trauma is too hard to talk about. I've worked hard enough on myself and in therapy that I feel comfortable talking about aspects of my trauma. And so, since I am fortunate enough to be in that position, I feel really strongly that it's something I wanna talk about. It's something I want to be in my writing so that I can help other people who maybe aren't at that point yet.
MC: Yeah. And also, in your author's note, you spoke a lot about how writing this story and incorporating those memories and those themes and those aspects from your own life was kind of an act of recovery in its own right. Can you tell us a little bit about that process and what that was like for you?
KG: Oh yeah. I had a lot of anger surrounding Trump's election, as I'm sure a lot of people did. And I felt very powerless and I didn't yet have the skills or knowledge to understand all of the racial microaggressions that I had been experiencing from my whole life. I also wanted to write my experiences into the story. And the act of writing it was hard.
It's such an empowering experience just to write your trauma and see it on paper, even if nothing comes of it. When we were in college, I was taking a playwriting course and there were some pieces I wrote for that course that were about some recent trauma I had experienced. And the act of writing it and then also the act of seeing everyone else in the class perform it and react to it, and to see that their reaction was also like, "This is not okay. What is happening?" was very validating and empowering for me.
Because, with trauma, if you're experiencing it, it's often very difficult to know that it is not okay. I needed a place to process all of my really charged emotions. And processing things through Shakespeare has always been very cathartic and very easy for me, because he's been my guy for a while. So, I think that the fact that it was through Much Ado also meant that it was a very safe place for me to do that processing. I knew that I wanted to be a writer and I knew that I wanted it to be published, but I also said to myself, "You know, Katalina, you do not have to publish this. This is something you're ultimately writing for yourself because you want to.” Knowing that I had the option to just keep it for myself made it easier to get those stories out there.
MC: Absolutely. Thank you for putting this story out there and opening yourself up. I absolutely loved it. I found it so touching, just an incredible story. And I think those pieces of yourself that you put into the story really stand out and make it just feel so realistic, so real, so raw, and so authentic.
KG: Thank you.
MC: And I think listeners are really gonna feel that too.
KG: Yeah. I really wanted to write recovery into it as well because, as I said, I worked really hard on my own recovery and in therapy and we don't see a lot of therapy skills presented in literature in general. I didn't want to write a story that was just focusing on the trauma and the horror of the trauma, but I wanted to write a story that was like, "Here's the horror of the trauma and here is how someone is actively getting through it.” And I was like, if I can find a way to sneak those into an entertaining story and it maybe subconsciously helps somebody who doesn't have access to therapy, that's all I want, man. That would be the best.
MC: I definitely think you're gonna accomplish that because, like you said, there are so many examples in Ben and Beatriz where it's like, “It's okay if you're not okay and here are some things that might help that have worked for Beatriz.” I definitely think people will pick up on that and really appreciate it.
I also know you're an avid reader, which we already chatted about a little bit, but are you a big listener too?
KG: Oh my God. I cannot tell you how present audiobooks are in my life. My parents split up when I was seven and my dad had a TV at his house, but my mom did not. So whenever I was at my mom's house, I had to adjust to not having a television. And so, to combat my instinct to come home and turn the TV on, my mom was like, "We are going to the library and we're getting audiobooks." And that became my entertainment for my entire childhood. I knew where the audiobook section in the library was. I could tell when they had added a new audiobook because I knew the entire section so well. Because of that, they've always been so comforting to me, and I still listen to them. Like, yesterday, I was relistening to the audiobook for I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston, which I listened to while I had COVID. And then I was like, "This is so delightful. I'm just going to start listening to it all over again."
MC: Casey is a favorite. We love audio here too, obviously. It is what we do. But knowing that you were such an audio fan, what was it like selecting the narrators for your own story?
KG: That was so much fun, and that was a really big pinch-me, surreal moment. I think the book didn't really feel like it was going to be a real book until I heard the audiobook. And I was like, "People were paid to read stuff I made up? What is happening? What is my life?" As I'm sure you remember, I'm a very diligent person [laughs]. And so when I got a couple choices of people that the producers were thinking about for the narrators, I listened to all of them and I took notes and compared and contrasted. And that was really fun.
Aida Reluzco, the second I heard her voice, I was like, "That is Beatriz.” That is how I pictured Beatriz sounding, to a T. How is that possible? That was a really exciting moment, to realize there was a narrator out there who just, like, was my main character.
MC: That is amazing. And I agree. Was there anything in particular you were looking for when you were trying to find the voices of Ben and Beatriz?
KG: Yeah. I was listening for how they phrased sentences, because it's really hard to read out loud and make it compelling. I think voice actors and audiobook narrators do not get enough appreciation for how hard their job is. And so I was listening to think, “Okay, are they just reading it or are they interpreting it and performing it?” And I was really listening for how they did other people's voices and if they were able to differentiate between the different characters. I also listened to see if any of them had done any work in an English accent because one of the characters has an English accent. And I was listening to how compelled I felt as a listener listening to the clips of their work that I was given.
MC: And that's where your love of audio and your experience with audio really helps out. Because you know what listeners love. I think these two were perfectly cast.
KG: Yeah. I was so astounded by James Fouhey, how he brought Ben to life. He just brought this subtlety and this nuance and so much emotion to Ben, even just reading Ben's narration. Not just reading Ben's interactions with other people, but the way he read Ben's narration, I found so compelling. And listening to it, I was like, "Oh, wow. I find Ben more sympathetic listening to James read him than I did writing him.” That is incredible. He brought subtleties to the character that I honestly didn't really think about.
MC: That's the power of audio. That's why we love it. Going back to this being your debut, as early reviews started to come in for Ben and Beatriz, you posted an Instagram story where you joked about creating a series about your publishing journey. And you joked about calling it Katalina Cries. So, I know that you wrote this book in eight weeks, which is just bananas on its own. That is a remarkable accomplishment. Can you tell us more about that journey of making this book come to life and become a thing that's out in the world now?
KG: Yeah. I was also shocked that I wrote the first draft in eight weeks because that is not normal for me [laughs]. But that was honestly because I was in quarantine. I had the idea for Ben and Beatriz in 2019 while I was watching a production of Much Ado About Nothing. And then I wrote down little thoughts like, “Okay, Ben can be from a WASP-y Cape Cod family. Beatriz can be a Latinx person.” And I kind of wrote down basic things and then put it away because, at that time, I was working on a very different novel that I have now shelved for a bit. By the time I sat down to write the first draft in March of 2020, the idea had been gestating. The idea had been bumping around in my brain for about a year or so. I wasn't actively thinking about it, but I think just the fact that it had been sitting there meant that when I went back to write it, it came out a lot more quickly because it had been there for a while.
And it also helped that Much Ado About Nothing is definitely the Shakespeare comedy I know the best because I've watched that David Tennant and Catherine Tate production so many times. And so, the fact that I knew the outline of the story and could pretty easily think about ways to manipulate it and move it around and think about the best ways to translate it into the novel format, because I was so familiar with what I was working with, it was able to come out a lot more quickly as well.
MC: Absolutely. And as you started getting in all of these early reviews, have there been really touching and impactful parts of that experience and that journey? How have you been feeling about it all?
KG: I used to religiously read reviews on Goodreads and NetGalley and I had to stop because I'm not quite at a point where I can take in things that people don't like about it. It's not gonna be for everybody and that's fine.
I get really, really emotional when some women who are from Panama—where Beatriz has Panamanian heritage and I have Panamanian heritage—and I've gotten a couple DMs on Instagram from women who are just like, "I needed to get in touch with you and tell you how meaningful it was to me to see both our flag on the cover of a book, but also to see a mola on the cover of the book." It has an amazing cover by an artist named Bokiba. For the background of the cover, she used an art form that is native to Panama that is very, very meaningful to Panamanian people, called molas. It is so meaningful to me to see a mola and the flag on the cover of a mainstream book. That's very emotional.
I remember one thing that a reviewer said that did make me cry was that they could write a thesis on the book and that the characters were very complex and their relationships to each other were so complex. And I am such an academic nerd. I read Shakespeare literary criticism for fun. It would be an ultimate dream of mine to ever write something marginally complex enough to be studied at any sort of academic level. So, the fact that somebody out there felt that way was really emotional to me because I was like, I'm not gonna get to this point in my career until at least five books in because I have to get better at my craft and all that stuff.
And especially the fact that somebody got to that point through character. Character is very, very important to me, both because of how much I love to read, but also because of my theater and acting background.
MC: I think I'm sensing an annotated version of Ben and Beatriz somewhere in the future.
KG: I would be so excited. I have low-key thought about that, to be honest [laughs].
MC: So, I also wanted to ask, what made you decide to tell this story as a romance?
KG: Well, I think the fact that it was Shakespeare. If you're gonna adapt Much Ado About Nothing, it has to be romance-y at some point, but there was a publishing reason because I, at that point, had been working on a YA novel that was also adapted from Shakespeare, shockingly. There's a theme with me. And that novel was very, very dark. It was also centered around trauma, but it didn't really have any of the lightness or the comedy that Ben and Beatriz does.
At the time that I started to write it, there was a really big market for that. When I was researching agents, everyone was saying, "I want dark, I want gritty, I want edgy YA." And I was like, "Okay, great. So, there's a market for this." And then Trump was elected and I noticed that there was a big shift in what agents were asking for. I would see people saying, "I want romance. I want rom-coms. I want light. I want happily-ever-afters." And I was getting a lot more rejections of my dark novel.
So, eventually, I was like, "Okay. I'm not gonna make it with this novel right now. Everybody wants a rom-com. I'm going to write a rom-com." But there had to be some darkness in there because that seems to be how my writing voice is coming out at this point. So, my decision was partially because it was Shakespeare but then partially because I was like, "This is my dream and I want it to happen. It's not gonna happen with the novel I'm currently working on."
MC: So, can you give us a sneak peek on what you're working on next? I know we mentioned there's a possibility for an annotated Ben and Beatriz somewhere down the line but anything more immediate that you're working on now?
KG: Honestly, I'm in a phase where I'm throwing a lot of projects at the creative wall and trying to see what sticks. I wish I had a better answer, but I guess the answer is I am working on things and there will be new things from me. I just do not know what form they will take yet.
MC: Do you think we'll ever get a follow-up or an epilogue for Ben and Beatriz?
KG: You might. You have to stay tuned with me, but you might.
MC: I'm excited. I like the sound of that.
So, listeners, you can find Ben and Beatriz by Katalina Gamarra on Audible now. Definitely give it a listen. And, Katalina, thank you again so much for taking the time to chat today.
