A Note: Below, I have used the word ‘American’ to refer to citizens of and actions taken by the United States, since there’s not another good option, though of course everyone from Tierra del Fuego to Nunavut is an American.

My novel Short War, which came out in April, is about a family of (mostly) American Jews that gets profoundly damaged by the Chilean coup of September 11^th, 1973. Chile’s military carried out the coup, but both the events of that day and the seventeen-year dictatorship that followed might not have been possible without the significant, covert support that the Chilean right, and right-wing regimes throughout Latin America, received from the United States. In Short War, the coup has tangible—and tragic—effects on my characters. This is not the case in my own life, but I would not have written this novel were it not for my conviction that American support of violence and oppression abroad is a moral weight all U.S. citizens carry. My feeling is that the government is obligated to tell me what my tax dollars are doing (an obligation it shirked in the case of the Chilean coup: not until the Senate’s Church Committee released its report on intelligence abuses in 1979 did anyone begin to know), and I am obligated to 1. Pay attention and 2. Speak when, as is currently the case in Palestine, my money is being used for ill.

I got interested in the coup as a sixteen-year-old exchange student in Chile. When I arrived there, I had no idea how intertwined American and Chilean history was; really, I had no understanding of how much the United States meddled in our hemisphere. The more I learned, the more embarrassed I got. For years afterward, I was ashamed to be American. In college, I spent a semester in Uruguay, partly so I could work on my Spanish and partly so I could learn the history of the Americas from a different perspective. It was an invaluable experience on many levels, one of which is that, while there, I had to face my shame so frequently that I moved through it. I realized that I was feeling a combination of anger at my country’s historical crimes and discomfort with the privilege that being American affords. My citizenship, I came to understand, functions in some ways as a golden ticket. (Consider travel: I can visit anywhere I want, often without the hassle of a visa, while people worldwide jockey to move to the country where I live.) I often suspect that it has shaped me more thoroughly than being a woman, or maybe even being Jewish. By the time I returned from Uruguay, I was thinking about how to use my American-ness in a productive way. 

Short War is an effort to recruit others to my way of thinking: to get other Americans to reckon with our privilege, our empire, our outsize influence on the world stage. For that reason, its point-of-view characters are all Americans—which was tricky, given that when I was researching, I had to read more in Spanish than English in order to get a real, detailed picture of the coup and the period immediately before. At first, I was frustrated at how little English-language writing there is on U.S. complicity in the Chilean coup, and with the dictatorships that spread across South America in the 1970s. But eventually, I started asking myself why I wanted an American perspective so much. It worked to learn what happened in Chile from Chilean scholars and archives. From Americans who were there, who were in neighboring countries with similar political trajectories, or who do study the subject, I learned how to write clearly, cleanly, and—I hope—bravely about the coup while maintaining my sense of guilt and accountability. 

Of course, I learned how to write my book from creative writers, too. I read every single memoir and novel I came across that touched on U.S. intervention in the Americas during the Cold War. Often, that meant reading about El Salvador, where the U.S. sponsored unbelievable human rights violations in the 1980s. The Salvadoran Civil War was very, very different from the Chilean coup and dictatorship, but reading the work of Americans who grappled with it as it was happening was extremely helpful to me. Here, I’m including only the books I found the most useful. One of them, Joan Didion’s snake-cold Salvador, was my example of how not to be. The rest? The opposite. 

Fiction and Memoir

Salvador, Joan Didion – Joan Didion visits El Salvador in the middle of its brutal civil war, during which the repressive government enjoyed over $1,000,000 per day in U.S. military aid and is characteristically icy and “neutral” about it. Awful! 

What You Have Heard Is True, Carolyn Forché – the anti-Didion! Forché, an immensely gifted poet, spent years in El Salvador as a human rights activist during the civil war. What You Have Heard Is True is a memoir of that time, and charts the evolution of her own consciousness of her American privilege and desire to use it for good. She is, on many levels, a role model for me.

Under the 82^nd Airborne, Deborah Eisenberg and A Grace Paley Reader, Grace Paley – both Eisenberg and Paley wrote short stories (and essays, in Paley’s case) about the Salvadoran civil war; both, like me, write from a Jewish perspective, Paley more explicitly than Eisenberg. Their ability to do political thought through character is a master class. 

Missionaries, Phil Klay – a big, sweeping, brilliant systems novel about the U.S. love of funding wars and arming governments around the globe. I wrote about it here as I was working on Short War. 

Who Is Vera Kelly?, Rosalie Knecht – a lesbian noir set in Buenos Aires during Argentina’s C.I.A.-assisted Cold War dictatorship, which has many parallels to Chile’s. (Also, the Argentine junta collaborated with the Chilean regime.) Knecht doesn’t make her American protagonist too sophisticated or brave; she lets her be hapless, self-interested, sometimes cowardly. In other words, she lets her be real, which was a useful reminder to me.

History and Journalism

Inside the Company: CIA Diary, Philip Agee – the ultimate primary source, CIA-wise: the diary of a disaffected officer who served in Uruguay not long before the military junta took over (and, who, naturally, helped the U.S. accelerate said takeover). 

The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins – the book for thinking about U.S.-backed violence during the Cold War, not just in Latin America but around the world. If you want more globe-level thinking —and, I should say, a little more of a pop-history vibe—move on from Bevins to Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop and Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow. The Brothers, Kinzer’s joint biography of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, is good here, too. 

Allende’s Chile, Edward Boorstin – Boorstin, an American economist, was an advisor to Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, before the coup. I could have put this in the memoir category, since it contains a whole lot of thinking about the weight of being American, but I used it as a primary source. 

The Condor Years, John Dinges and Predatory States, Patrice McSherry – the two most important books by Americans on Operation Condor, the code name for the C.I.A. project that funded right-wing coups and regimes in South America during the Cold War, then helped those regimes collaborate in repressing dissidents. Both books are unmissable, but I’d start with McSherry’s for the true historical overview, then go to Dinges’s, which is informed by his time as a journalist in Santiago and gives you a whole new level of detail.

How to Read Donald Duck, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart – I’m cheating by including this, since Dorfman was born in Argentina and lived much of his adult life in Chile, but he wrote this seminal text on U.S. imperialism while living in the U.S.—and he’s lived here since going into exile after the coup, so I’m saying he counts.