Book Club

6 takeaways from Book Club’s ‘The Bullet Swallower’ discussion

Author Elizabeth Gonzalez James joined Boston.com's Book Club to discuss her new magical realism Western, "The Bullet Swallower."

Gonzalez James captured the intertwined history and culture of the Texas-Mexico border in “The Bullet Swallower.”

By Zipporah Osei

Growing up, author Elizabeth Gonzalez James didn’t know much about her great-grandfather, who died before she was born. But she and all her cousins did know one story: He had been a bandito who broke free from a Houston jail, shot in the face by Texas rangers, and lived to tell the tale. 

The author decided to use the story as the basis for her latest novel, “The Bullet Swallower,” a fantastical Western tale of the U.S.-Mexico border and a dramatized account of her family’s history. Gonzalez James told Boston.com readers at a recent Book Club author discussion, that she could feel the spirit of her great grandfather — nicknamed El Tragabalas, or the bullet swallower — with her as she worked on the novel.

“I never met him. He was born in 1864 so he was long dead before I was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye,” the author shared. “But I was very aware the whole time I was writing the book that, if I believe in ghosts and if I believe that his ghost was wandering around in the periphery while I was writing this book, I wanted his ghost to be happy. I wanted his ghost to be satisfied with how I had portrayed the highly fictionalized version of him on the page.”

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The book’s inspiration is rooted in truth, but it still took a lot of research to do the story justice. Gonzalez James said she read upwards of 50 books about Texas and Mexican history, Western outlaws, magical realism, and the culture of the mid-19th century.

“I decided to write a magical realism Western knowing nothing about magical realism or Westerns or life along the Texas-Mexico border in the 1800s. I knew nothing of nothing about nothing so I had to read up on literally every element in the entire novel,” she said.

But the work was a labor of love for Gonzalez James, who spent all of her formative years in South Texas, a region of the country that feels, in many ways, like an extension of Mexico.

“It was a really cool place to grow up and I have a lot of really strong nostalgic feelings about it,” she said. “I went to Catholic school when I was little, and half of the kids in my Catholic school lived in Mexico. They just commuted across every day to go to school and that was normal. My dad’s dentist was in Mexico. People don’t live here or there. They live on both sides of the border. They always have.”

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Gonzalez James captured the intertwined history and culture of the region in “The Bullet Swallower,” a novel that’s been praised by critics for its “gorgeous language and gripping story.” She was joined by Lisa Valentino, founder and owner of Ink Fish Books in Warren, R.I. to discuss her newest novel, the family lore she uncovered while writing it, and what comes next for the story. 

Read on for takeaways from their discussion and sign up for more Book Club updates.

While writing the novel, the author traced her family history back centuries.

Before she started writing “The Bullet Swallower,” Gonzalez James didn’t know much about her father’s side of the family, except that previous generations had moved back and forth between the U.S.-Mexico border. Once she started her research, she found that her family was very well documented. She discovered she is an ancestor of one of the founding families in her father’s birthplace in Mexico and traced her lineage back 700 years to a Spanish royal. 

“When I decided that I wanted to start writing this book, I started kind of a genealogical deep dive,” she said. “And so that was really the revelation, that I had this incredible lineage that I knew nothing about.”

For the author, crafting dynamic characters starts with self-reflection.

While Gonzalez James feels confident in her world-building skills, she admits that creating dimensional characters doesn’t come quite as naturally. With the protagonists of this story, Antonio and Jaime, it took a lot more work than it had in the past to understand their motivations. The author joked that every character she writes is a version of herself.

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“Ultimately, there’s little nuggets of me hidden in the different characters in ‘The Bullet Swallower,’” Gonzalez James said. “I also joke that becoming a fiction writer, you have to almost get a DIY Master’s degree in human psychology because for every action you’re asking your character to do on the page, it has to be motivated … there’s a lot of questioning people’s interior states and motivations.”

“The Bullet Swallower” and Gonzalez James’ other works are intentionally infused with humor.

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Bookseller Lisa Valentino praised the author for having  the characters be funny even in the midst of “horrible situations” and heavy storylines. Gonzalez James said she was inspired by her favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders, who both leaned into gallows humor in their works. She said she’s always gravitated towards using a comedic voice in her writing and her day-to-day life. 

“I could get you know, academic about gallows humor and how you just kind of need a pressure valve but, I don’t know, I just like to crack jokes. I use humor and sarcasm a lot in my normal life to gain a sense of ironic detachment,” she said. “I think the humor just slips itself into the books, for better or for worse.”

The 2016 election influenced the way Gonzalez James wrote “The Bullet Swallower.”

Gonzalez James started writing this novel in 2016, months before the presidential election, when anti-immigration rhetoric around the U.S.-Mexico border was particularly vitriolic. 

“I didn’t know where the country was and it was really scary … What the book was changed over the years that I spent writing it because I was responding to real-time events as they were happening,” she said. 

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The setting of the book and her genealogy research also forced her to reckon with the history of Mexico’s relationship to the United States and her own ancestors’ complicity in tragedy.

“I think the central question that came out of the Trump years and that is still a major part of our country’s reckoning with itself today is can we be better than our ancestors? I believe in my heart that the answer is yes, but it takes time,” the author said. “I’m sure that I have ancestors who were guilty of doing unspeakable things to the native people who are living in Mexico. That’s something that I own up to. Now, what is my responsibility? I don’t know. But it begins with acknowledging it.”

The writing process forced the author to be open to change.

Because the book was researched and written over the course of five years, a lot changed between the first draft and publication. For one, the entire second half of the novel was scrapped by her agent before being edited and reincorporated at the suggestion of her editor. When her agent suggested she make big cuts to the story, she was initially upset, but realized that the changes would make for a better story.

“I had this whole other universe of plot where [Jaime] went to Dorado to film the movie and there was gun smuggling. There was Castro stuff. There was a dam that was being built between the two countries. It was just craziness and so a lot of the editing was just dealing with the 37 different plots I had going on simultaneously in this novel … the editing process was a lot,” she said. 

“The Bullet Swallower” may be coming to a screen near you.

The novel was optioned for film before publication and Gonzalez James is currently at work adapting it into a script for a feature film. Her dream cast includes Pedro Pascal as Antonio, Javier Bardem as Jaime, and character actor Walton Goggins as Cyrus Fish (who she imagined as she was originally writing the character). This is her first time doing a film adaptation and she described the process as “really exciting … also really scary.”