When Katie Gutierrez’s debut novel was released in 2022, the writer and her work were greeted with praises and reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, Parade Magazine, Kirkus Review, Good Housekeeping, Crime Reads, She Reads, and more. More Than You’ll Ever Know was a Good Morning America Book Club pick for June 2022. On Oprah Daily’s July 22, 2022 list of 15 books to read, Gutierrez’s novel topped the list.
Gutierrez is a National Magazine Award finalist whose essays and features have appeared in TIME, Texas Highways, Harper’s Bazaar, and Texas Monthly.
Her story on Día de los Muertos — Earth, Water, Wind and Fire — is featured in the September 2025 issue of Texas Highways.
She lives in San Antonio with her husband and their two children.
INTERVIEW BY VALERIE GONZALEZ
Tragaluz: How did growing up in Laredo shape your perspective as a storyteller?
Gutierrez: Laredo is not quite Mexico, but also not quite the U.S. It’s its own little pocket. You can’t really call it small, but it still feels small. The culture of Laredo is one of family and traditions. There’s a duality there, too —“Happy Birthday to You” and Las Mañanitas, English and Spanish, often both in the same sentence. Time in other cities allowed me to understand that Laredo is an interesting, special place. It took a long time to let my upbringing here influence my storytelling. Now I feel like the “both/and-ness” of Laredo kind of defines how I try to see my characters — it’s a resistance to simple binaries, or two-dimensionality in a place that’s so multilayered. I hope my storytelling reflects that depth.
Tragaluz: Were there any particular memories, places, or people in Laredo that inspired elements of this novel? What gave you the ganas to write this story and highlight so many Laredo landmarks?
Gutierrez: The financial struggle my father endured during the peso devaluation in the 1980s inspired the Rivera Iron Works and it’s owner, Lore’s husband Fabian Rivera.
A scene at Lore’s parents’ house for Sunday lunch was very much inspired by my memories of Sunday at my grandpa’s house. The biggest inspiration came from my parents’ stories of the peso devaluation, a difficult time as small business owners and as a young married couple. That environment of lack was a ripe background for characters making choices they might not ordinarily make. Fortunately, my parents made better ones!
The ganas to write this story and to highlight much of Laredo, rests in my first 18 years of reading dozens, maybe hundreds, of books a year, and only one was by a Latina author, Sandra Cisneros, who wrote The House on Mango Street. As I got older, I realized how little Mexican-American communities and culture were represented in literature and still are today. Only 6% of published authors are of Latino descent, which made me feel the increasing necessity to set my stories in the places I knew, within the culture I love.
Tragaluz: What was your reading/writing life like growing up? Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?
Gutierrez: My mom is a book lover, and before my brother and sister and I could read, she read to us every night. As we got older, my parents took us to B. Dalton every Saturday after lunch. They never rushed us, always let me sit for ages in the children’s section in the back, searching for books in series like Goosebumps, Fear Street, Sweet Valley Twins, The Babysitters Club, and Nancy Drew. On trips to San Antonio, Barnes and Noble was our first stop after lunch. Presenting my parents with stacks of books, they never told me to put any back or told me what I could and couldn’t read, even when I started getting into adult crime fiction at a pretty early age. I read every night and for hours on weekend mornings. During the summers, I’d invite my brother and sister to “reading parties” in my room, which they’d usually decline. Now there’s a Silent Book Club in San Antonio where strangers get together in various parts of the city to read their books in silence, together. That’s a reading party! I was a reader before I was anything else. Some of my first conscious memories are intertwined with reading — both being read to and the moment I started reading on my own and my world cracked open.
In third grade, I wrote a story and fell in love with writing fiction. From then on, it was all I wanted to do. I wrote stories and novels through elementary, middle, and high school, and I never had a fallback career desire. I tell aspiring writers that you need to possess an almost delusional level of self-belief, and I had that in spades. Often, I told my dad I would be the world’s youngest published author. (Spoiler: I wasn’t.) I got my MFA, and while I was piling up rejections (and some acceptances!) for my short stories, I wrote marketing copy, white papers, newspaper articles, and magazine profiles. I proofread and did developmental editing and eventually was executive editor of a small hybrid publishing company, helping other people write and edit their books. There was a period in which I thought that was what I was meant to do. Then in 2015, my dad and my husband encouraged me to leave my job for one year and focus on writing a novel. One year, full time, best shot. I didn’t realize it would actually take five years and an unpublished novel before More Than You’ll Ever Know sold, and another two years after that to see it published. Taking that risk, with the support of people who believed in me, changed everything. Still, even if I’d never been published, even if I were never published again, I’d always be writing.
Tragaluz: More Than You’ll Ever Know moves between two timelines, Lore’s story in 1980s Laredo and Mexico City and the writer Cassie’s investigation in 2017. What inspired this structure and these characters?
Gutierrez: The seed for the book germinated in 2008, when I happened upon a story of a wealthy Florida man who’d lived a double life for more than 30 years — living with his wife of 52 years, with whom he had three kids, and then, 20 miles down the road, also lived with another woman, with whom he had two kids. All five kids went to the same elite prep school, where both women served as trustees and each had a wing of the school named after them. All of this came out after the man’s first wife died, and he officially married the second woman two weeks later. I’d heard of double life stories, but this one felt particularly gutting to me — three decades of deceit. I wondered how he justified the lies and whether it was possible the women truly didn’t know. I wondered how someone gets into that situation and maintains it for so long. I did some digging and quickly realized it’s mostly men who live these double marriages. I wondered what it would take for a woman to do the same. What would be similar, what would be different?
That was the initial thread, but I didn’t follow it up for almost 10 years, when I was on submission — that is, publishers were reviewing and considering publishing—with a different novel. To take my mind off all the incoming rejections, I went back to this idea. Maybe because I’d initially read the double life story as a news article, I’d always been drawn to the idea of a journalist character, someone who puts pressure on the woman living a double life. So my first question was when the book would be set, and I decided on the 80s for two reasons: one, it felt like a more plausible time period for a woman to pull this off, before the ubiquity of phones and the Internet and social media; and secondly, it would allow for an interplay between past and present. Once I landed on that, it felt like I kept playing with the idea of doubles — two timelines, two husbands, two cities, two women who don’t realize they’re sort of warped mirror images of each other. It allowed for more complexity.
Tragaluz: The story explores themes of motherhood, betrayal, love, and secrecy, particularly through Lore’s double life. What drew you to that complexity?
Gutierrez: I’ve always been drawn to the darker sides of the human experience, and how often they can co-exist with the brighter ones. The idea of “good people” making “bad decisions” has always compelled me. How do we define good and bad in these contexts? How much pain does a person have to cause in order to not be “good” anymore? I’m interested in the lies people tell themselves and others and why it’s so difficult to be completely honest about who we are and what we want. I’m interested in the push and pull between people’s desires and their fears, and how we find moments of connection and truth even in the midst of deception.
As far as motherhood, I became a mom twice over while writing and editing this book, and some of those years were during a global pandemic, when it was mothers who left the workforce in droves, even if they were making more money than the fathers, in order to homeschool and care for their children. As a new mom, I was experiencing such extreme emotions — heart-shattering love, endless worry, extreme boredom, a lot of physical pain — and also witnessing how our society both glorifies certain kinds of mothers and refuses to actually value that work in a meaningful way. I saw firsthand how quickly and viciously people judge mothers who voice anything but how #blessed they are. In response to an essay I’d written for TIME about pandemic motherhood, someone emailed me that I should have gotten a pandemic puppy instead of having kids, that I wasn’t fit to be a mother, and they feared for my children’s safety. That’s how much we’re expected to give up our previous identity and voice. Ultimately, I saw my character Lore with a lot of compassion, because I think what she wanted most was was permission to continue growing as a woman, not only as a mother.
Tragaluz: Was Lore based on a real story or a composite of ideas and cultural observations?
Gutierrez: Lore is her own character. She came to me almost whole, and I fell asleep many nights listening to her tell her story in my mind. This does not always happen with writing. Cassie, for example, took work. But Lore, I think, had been inside me, wanting to exist for years, and when I gave her the opportunity, she didn’t waste it.
Tragaluz: The book has struck a powerful chord with Mexican American readers. What does it mean to you to see South Texas reflected in national conversations about literature and identity?
Gutierrez: First I have to acknowledge how Mexican-American novelists are writing from and about South Texas right now: in no particular order, Sandra Cisneros, Rudy Ruiz, Fernando Flores, Ursula Villarreal-Moura, Kimberly Garza, Elizabeth Gonzalez James, Rubén Degollado, Marcela Fuentes. The list goes on, and our way was paved by Gloria Anzaldua, Tomás Rivera, and Rolando Hinojosa-Smith. For many years publishing tried to pigeonhole “Mexican” stories into stories of immigration or trauma, and all of these writers demonstrate how limited that conception of our stories is. It’s been extremely meaningful to be a part of this conversation, and to contribute toward a South Texas literary canon.
Tragaluz: What do you hope readers from the border, especially Laredo, take away from More Than You’ll Ever Know?
Gutierrez: That they’ll take away the knowledge that we belong in literature — and that our stories are rich, varied, beautiful, and complicated, unable to be contained by genre or stereotypes. I hope they see parts of themselves in some of the characters and hear through their dialogue a familiar cadence of speech. I hope the book inspires readers from Laredo to pick up more novels by Latino authors, to not wait as long as I did before seeking them out.
Tragaluz: As a writer who’s published across major outlets like TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, and Texas Monthly, how did your journalism background influence your fiction writing?
Gutierrez: My background in journalism, which was never a part of my writing plan, taught me how to research, how to interview, and how important specificity is in telling a story that feels vivid and true. I do a ton of research for every project. For MTYEK, that included learning about the peso devaluation of the 80s by reading archived national, local, and international newspaper articles and also talking to my parents, who lived through it; watching old news clips on YouTube about the Mexico City earthquake, and talking to a photographer who’d been there firsthand and was able to share his photos; doing a deep dive into the complex relationship between journalists and their sources; exploring through nonfiction why women are true crime’s biggest audience; digging up old subway maps of Mexico City; Googling the price of cigarettes in the mid-eighties. I could go on and on. To me, every detail matters, both for the story and out of respect for readers. If I’m going to write about something I haven’t personally experienced, I have to acknowledge that someone out there has, and I want to respect that person enough to do my best to get it right.
Tragaluz: What has it been like navigating literary success while staying grounded in your roots balancing national acclaim with your South Texas identity?
Gutierrez: Publishing, always my dream, now is my career. It’s definitely the business part of the process, while the writing is the art. It is easy to lose yourself in the business of publishing with anxieties about sales, reviews, or awards. Writing, on the other hand, keeps me grounded. With every project, I feel like I’m learning all over again how to tell a story — how to inhabit a character, to write a good sentence, to explore complicated questions without coming to easy answers. Writing connects me with who I am and where I’m from. I’m cherishing this time drafting my new novel without having to be in promotion-mode because this is the part of the process that feels pure. On top of that, I’m a mom to a 7-year-old daughter and 5-year-old son. While it’s important to me that they see me realizing my dreams and ambitions, to them I’m just Mom. And that’s also healthy for me, remembering that these two beautiful human beings don’t care how many words I wrote that day or whether I got a starred review. They just want me to look at the fort they built, or jump in the pool with them, or, of course, read them one more chapter before bed.
Tragaluz: Are you working on anything new; will we see more stories rooted in Laredo or the borderlands?
Gutierrez: My new novel, tentatively to be published summer 2027, is inspired by an infamous murder trial in San Antonio, and revolves around three women named Emma and the charismatic man between them. It explores the intersection of wealth and power, medical gaslighting, and the kidnappings along the border circa 2012, and ultimately it asks whether bad behavior can ever be balanced out by good. I’m really excited about it, and I hope readers will love it. As far as more stories rooted in Laredo or the borderlands — absolutely. South Texas is home, and pieces of home will always be in my books.
