SOURCE: “Brief Encounter: An Interview with Manuel Puig,” in Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 11, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 165-76.

In the following interview, which was conducted in September 1979, Puig discusses his career as a writer and the various influences on his work.

This interview with Manuel Puig took place during a weekend in September 1979, after he was part of a Congress of Hispanic-American Writers in Medellin, Colombia. Other participants in the event were Camilo José Cela, winner of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the Mexican short-story writer and novelist Juan Rulfo.

[Jorgelina Corbatta:] What role does the reader play in your work? Are you aware of a future reader when you write a novel? Has the reader's taste ever influenced the way you constructed a book?

[Manuel Puig:] Whenever I write, I'm always thinking of the reader. I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader...