This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Marta Pérez-Carbonell, whose novel I Made You Up Inside My Head, translated by Rosalind Harvey, is out today from Riverhead Books. Pérez-Carbonell’s protagonist is a translator named Alicia who takes a London-based job in the summer of 2020 that requires her to travel to Edinburgh for one week each month, a journey she makes via sleeper train. On one such ride, she meets two American men, an older writer named Terrence Milton and his protégé, Mick Boulder. Milton is dealing with the ramifications of publishing a novel that stirs up controversy when it is found to be based on the life of a real person. Alicia is battling her own ghosts as well. Their stories dance around each other, offering insights into how we understand ourselves and each other. As Alicia observes early on in the book, “The gaze of others is a mirror there is no use trying to escape, one of those claustrophobic spaces at an old-fashioned funfair where concave and convex mirrors reflect back an ever more distorted image of ourselves. None offers an objective reflection, but it’s not as if any of us has ever seen our own face either, except in the form of an inverted symmetry.” In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews notes that I Made You Up Inside My Head is “unsettling and powerful,” adding, “this novel about who and what we choose to believe is a triumph.” Author William Boyd adds that the book is “a tremendous novel with a cool and engrossing narrative voice that resonates with memorable intensity and effect.” Marta Pérez-Carbonell was born and raised in Spain and now teaches contemporary Spanish literature at Colgate University. She has also worked as a translator and interpreter. I Made You Up Inside My Head is her first novel.
Marta Pérez-Carbonell, author of I Made You Up Inside My Head. (Credit: Marta Pérez-Carbonell)
1. How long did it take you to write I Made You Up Inside My Head?
This is an interesting question! I started writing it ten years before it was published. That doesn’t mean I spent a decade working on the book, but back in 2014, when I still lived in London and spent a lot of time on trains, I had this vision of a nighttime train journey in which reality and fiction collided. I started drafting the first few scenes and then put it on hold for almost a decade.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
The most challenging thing was that my time to write the book came many years after I had the first idea for it. It wasn’t easy to decide what to do with a story that was a part of me for such a long time. When the story first came to me, I was finishing my PhD and launching my academic career. Then I got a tenure track professorship at Colgate University and was once again focusing on something else. Working on novels and short stories by some of the most accomplished authors in Spain also meant I had so much respect for literature and was petrified to “get it wrong.” But just like there is a right time for readers to read a book, the right time came for me to write this one.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I would rather write at home, but I have always found I can write anywhere if I’m in the right mindset. Equally, I can be in the most ideal setting and not be able to write if I’m not focused.
I prefer to write in the morning, as soon as I wake up, before thinking about the world or the day ahead.
I write as often as I can! But it depends a lot on what’s going on in my life. When I’m in the middle of a book (and especially if I’m already in the second half), I try to write every day. If that’s not possible, then I work on editing a scene, I look through my notes, or I engage with the story in other ways.
4. What are you reading right now?
I just finished reading Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories (Simon & Schuster, 2026) and Georgi Gospodinov’s Death and the Gardener (Liveright, 2025), both of which happen to be grief memoirs. Last night I started Erietta (Acantilado, 2026) by Spanish writer Clara Pastor.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
It’s interesting that certain authors are widely recognized in some countries but not others (and these countries aren’t always their own). I’m surprised that Theodor Kallifatides, the Greek/Swedish writer, doesn’t have wider recognition in the English-speaking world. He writes beautifully about memory, identity, migration, a life split between two languages and countries.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
The “urgent,” I guess. For most people, any form of creation is hindered by the so-called tangible things. That is, obligations such as jobs and domestic responsibilities, things that feel urgent: paperwork, bills, errands. Writing feels like a luxury, something that can always be postponed in favor of a never-ending to-do list. It’s a good idea, I think, to keep checking in with yourself: Is something important to you or does it just feel urgent?
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
When I got back this novel (in Spanish) with my editor’s notes, that was a first for me! Suddenly, a story that only I knew about and that had been with me for so many years was in someone else’s hands. And they had things to say about it! It was both exciting and daunting. Before I approached the text, my editor said something that stayed with me: “You will find the balance between trusting me and trusting your gut. And that balance is the sweet spot where a good book takes the right shape.”
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started I Made You Up Inside My Head, what would you say?
The earlier me would have never thought that this story I started scribbling in a small notebook on the train between Waterloo and Egham would one day see the light in so many languages! I didn’t think what ended up happening was even possible. So, I would tell her nothing! Let her enjoy the ride.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of I Made You Up Inside My Head?
My research work was crucial to creating this novel. I wrote my PhD on the uncertainty and use of language in the works of Spanish writer Javier Marías. Diving into his fictional world was key to developing my own voice and fleshing out the issues I would become obsessed with in my own writing. His magnetic prose is also an inspiration that pushes me to be a better writer every day.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
I remember hearing George Saunders say that writers needed to be mindful of the time of the reader. Readers could be reading any other book, he said, and they could also be doing anything else. Instead, they chose to sit down with your novel. So be respectful of their time. I always keep this in mind. Perhaps you need to tell a story which is five hundred pages long, but do you, really? Or could you give them your best version at 450? I execute this advice by reading my stories out loud and considering every paragraph carefully. Do I need all of it? Does the prose flow? Or do I cut and/or rewrite?
