Willie Perdomo quotes

How is one to reconstruct a memory of a place that doesn't exist anymore? I mean the buildings are still there, but the faces are no longer the same. Gentrified NYC has pretty much eviscerated the nuances of particular neighborhoods, like El Barrio... (Willie Perdomo)
I tried to capture the recollection of that experience. As if to say, you have these war-like, traumatic experiences and you retell them and retell them and each time you add something that wasn't there the first time. The truth effect of that is that it just becomes larger and larger because your memory details are at work. The question then becomes: how many of those little embellishments-how many of those little nuances-can you add up before they tell a larger truth about the time that you were living in? That's really the effect of writing a book, I think... View quote
Willie Perdomo