"I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something"

Puig’s assertion reveals a novelist who refuses the myth of pure aesthetic neutrality. Stories, for him, are acts of address, crafted not just to entertain or reveal self but to alter another person’s stance in the world. “Somebody” is deliberately vague: a reader, a censor, a lover, a compatriot, even the writer himself; “something” may be as intimate as a feeling or as sweeping as a political conviction. The phrase strips literature of sanctimony and grants it the frankness of rhetoric: novels argue. They argue through seduction rather than decree, through voice, rhythm, suspense, gossip, tenderness, and the slow rearrangement of sympathies.

Puig’s pages are built from fragments of popular culture, melodrama, film scripts, and overheard talk. Those forms are not ornaments; they are persuasive engines. By elevating the vernacular, he tries to convince us that mass culture carries truths high culture has refused to hear. By centering queer desire and marginal lives under authoritarian shadows, he asks readers to feel what theory cannot compel: the urgency of another’s dignity. In Kiss of the Spider Woman, the prison cell becomes a classroom where storytelling converts fear into solidarity; persuasion here is ethical, intimate, and cumulative. Even his structural gambits, transcripts, dossiers, discontinuous scenes, invite readers to assemble meaning themselves, and that labor of assembly produces conviction from within rather than compliance from above.

To write “to convince” is not to preach. It is to wager that imagination can smuggle arguments past defenses, that identification can move where logic stalls. The risk of manipulation is real, but Puig leans on ambiguity, irony, and multiplicity; he persuades by complicating, by letting characters disarm us with charm and contradiction. Each novel becomes a letter to a particular addressee, posted from the margins toward the center, asking for a small but irrevocable shift in gaze. Persuasion, then, is not an afterthought of style but the moral core of narrative: changing how somebody sees “something” so that the world, slightly, changes too.