LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE MARCH-SEPTEMBER ISSUE | Page 14

In the Country by Mia Alvar
Alvar was born in the Philippines and lived there until she was six, after
which her family moved to Bahrain and eventually to New York. As a
writer, she has the ability to capture that peculiar blend of excitement
and pain that comes with uprooting oneself from a specific place or idea.
Many of the stories in the book deal with literal border-crossings, but
what binds the collection together more broadly is a sense of creative
displacement. This is a book in which characters are addicted to
dreaming, embellishing, or outright lying, and in one story a young
woman even goes so far as to become that most heinous of fraudsters: a
fiction writer. “I never could get used to the ‘withdrawal,’” ѡ