In Mirta Ojito’s Debut Novel, a Journey Through the Past

‘Deeper Than the Ocean’ delves into generational trauma, family secrets and more

Virginia R. Cueto,

AARP

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En español

Published October 09, 2025

a collage showing old family photos, a rusted shipwreck, a birth certificate and a journal

AARP (Getty Images, 5; Mirta Ojito, 2)

Recurring dreams of searching for a daughter she never had. A lifelong fear of the ocean. The startling discovery that her mother’s beloved grandmother is listed among the dead of a long-lost shipwreck. In Deeper Than the Ocean, writer Mirta Ojito’s first foray into fiction, one woman’s search for answers sets her on a journey of self-discovery and unexpected revelations that hook the reader from the first page to the last.

It’s a saga told in a dual narrative that spans more than a century, three continents and five generations of one family. Using alternating chapters that trace the stories of the two principal heroines — Catalina Quintana, born in the Canary Islands at the turn of the 20th century, and her great-granddaughter Mara Denis, a modern-day journalist working and living in New York and Spain — the book delivers all that historical fiction fans could want: There’s passion. Love. Loss. The Old World, the New World. The real shipwreck of the Valbanera, a Spanish steamer headed for Havana whose 488 passengers and crewmen perished in 1919 off the coast of Key West. And a modern quest for identity and home that uncovers long-guarded family secrets.

For Ojito, 61, a Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy Award-winning journalist with two nonfiction books to her name, the switch to fiction writing was unexpectedly cathartic.

“I discovered that when you’re in the creative process, which is a wonderful, amazing headspace that I did not feel during my nonfiction books, this was something different and magical and absolutely glorious,” Ojito says. “I cannot wait to go back to it.”

It is, Ojito says, the book she owed her late mother and thinks of it as her mother’s last gift to her.

Mirta Ojito is a Pulitzer Prize- and Emmy Award-winning journalist.

Marcelo A. Villar

Although she had initially set out to write about the Valbanera, Ojito, who arrived in the United States during the five months of mass migration from Cuba known as the Mariel boatlift in 1980 — a moment in history documented in her first book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus — soon found herself weaving in many of the stories her mother told her about her own ancestors.

The result is a seductive narrative that explores love, marriage, family and, above all, the relationship between mothers and daughters. It takes an unflinching yet compassionate look at lives caught in the inexorable forces of historical events, traditions, customs and expectations. At times, Deeper Than the Ocean is reminiscent of Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate or María Dueñas’ The Vineyard. AARP interviewed Ojito at her home in Coral Gables, Florida, ahead of the book’s Nov. 4 release.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You have made a career as a journalist and an editor and authored two nonfiction books, Finding Mañana and Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town. Now, at 61, you surprise us with your debut novel. Is this a book you always thought you would write, or did it surprise you as well?

To me, the big surprise is that I write books at all. I always thought of myself as a journalist and only as a journalist. But then the first book happened, Finding Mañana, and it was a big success on many levels. And then the second book happened. So I’m on this path now: I’m going to write books. But I have a very demanding full-time job. The idea of dedicating the amount of time that I do to report a nonfiction book was just daunting. So I thought, OK, I’m just going to have to write a novel. That was in 2014.

So it’s been percolating for the past 10 years?

For a lot longer. In 2006, I found this book El misterio del Valbanera in a shop in Key West. It was like $10 and about a shipwreck off the coast of Key West in 1919, and I thought, How come I didn’t know about this? The more I looked into it, the more an idea began forming in my head: I have to write about this. But I couldn’t dedicate the time to write a proper nonfiction book, and then I thought, Well, I’ll turn it into a novel. I began writing it little by little, and it’s been almost 20 years, believe it or not.

How different was the process of writing fiction versus nonfiction?

Well, I can tell you that in nonfiction, I never would have dared to write about a place where I had never been, and I had never been to the Canary Islands until January this year. When you write fiction, there’s so much freedom. It’s just me and my laptop. My sense of responsibility is only to writing a good story. While with nonfiction, you have the responsibility of writing a good story that’s also true.

But you’re no stranger to Spain.

When I was teaching, I used to spend my summers there. But always in the north, which is why I place Mara in Santander. That’s my home away from home.

In a way, I was also inspired by the fact that Spain has opened its doors to the children and grandchildren of Spanish citizens all over the Americas. I know so many people who are applying for [Spanish] citizenship and who are looking for their papers.

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And that’s how you developed the modern storyline for Mara?

That’s how I brought it to the present. How do you find out a family secret? You have to be looking for it. So I had Mara looking for [Catalina’s] birth certificate.

You are a voracious reader. Were there any specific authors who motivated you to write fiction, or who might have influenced the way you chose to tell this story?

I love historical fiction, and there are certain writers that I always look for their latest books: Kristin Harmel, who wrote The Winemaker’s Wife; Tatiana de Rosnay, who wrote Sarah’s Key; Armando Correa, with The German Girl; and Kristin Hannah — I really love her writing.

I would have to say that my earliest influence — and to a certain degree, I’m always aspiring to be like him — would be Guy de Maupassant. When I lived in Cuba without any possibility of travel anywhere outside the island, Guy de Maupassant and his books opened up for me a window to France, and I thought, If I can imagine France this way, I can imagine the world. This very intentional act of using literature as a way of seeing worlds and enjoying worlds that I couldn’t possibly get to know was very, very important to me.

In this family photo, Mirta Ojito’s mother, Mirta Muñoz Quintana, is in the front row holding the goat.

Courtesy Mirta Ojito

This book is dedicated to your mother and indeed inspired by and based on the stories she told you about your family as you were growing up. If you had to pick one, which aspect of her personality or her character most strongly colors or influences the story?

She was a loving person. A very smart woman, a very smart reader. She had great intuition; she could immediately size up people. She only had a sixth-grade education, but she was wise and very strong. She had to go through a lot because her mom died when she was only 16, and she had four younger siblings.

It’s always been very important in my life, the fact that my mother lost her own mother when she was very young. I grew up with her trauma. I remember her waking me up the year I turned 16, crying. And I said, “Why are you crying?” And she said, “Because I’m 40 and you’re 16, and I am afraid I’m going to die and leave you alone.” My biggest fear was that my mother was going to die young. Those are traumas that somehow shape you and stay with you.

I re-create a lot of those stories in the book. Certain things happen to different characters; not in order, but it’s all true.

The ocean is a constant presence. It is also a source of dread for the main character, Mara. Can you talk more about that?

When you’re born on an island, you’re defined by [the ocean]. It can be your path to the rest of the world or a barrier that impedes your going anywhere. For me, growing up, it was a barrier. We could not leave Cuba when we wanted to, and basically the sea separated us from every other place.

In the end, the sea was my way out. The sea was my path to freedom and a new life. But I am very afraid of the sea, like the character of Mara. I don’t know if it’s a reason why I am afraid, but researching this book I realized that Cuba, and the whole Caribbean, really, is surrounded by shipwrecks, buried deep in the ocean. That so many people have died either looking for freedom or a new life — not just Cubans but Haitians, Spaniards coming to Cuba — the weight of all those souls weighs very heavily in my heart.

In the book, Mara’s nightmares of searching for her daughter — a daughter she never had — seem to indicate a mystical or metaphysical connection to her great-grandmother Catalina. Are you saying you believe we carry unseen or unexplained connections to others, to our ancestors?

I believe in generational trauma, and there’s a lot of research that points that way. We’re just beginning to understand our DNA. We don’t know everything, but I do think that we have la huella del pasado, the imprint of the past, in our DNA.

Mara eventually makes peace with the ocean, and it is clear in the book she does it “to honor my dead and honor my name.” Why is it important for her, or for us, to know and honor our past?

I think the character of Mara did what I wish I had done. I’m astonished at my lack of follow-through with my own family in following the leads and understanding more where I come from. It’s almost like we began in Cuba, but that’s not true. We didn’t. Being a journalist, I was so invested in telling the stories of other people that I just didn’t pay attention to my own.

You tell the story from the point of view of its heroines. What common thread unites them across the more than 100 years that the book spans?

The desperate love that we have for our children. There is nothing stronger that I have found in real life and in literature.

Is that the heart of the story?

There are three things. The love mothers have for their children, absolutely. Family secrets. Every family has secrets. And then the family trauma, the generational trauma.

There have been multiple studies that show that we are changed at the cell level by generational trauma. I think it gets transformed from generation to generation. My mother — this is interesting — she always wanted to be a writer. She didn’t get to be a writer, but I did. And so I think we are always evolving but also somehow rooted in the past.

But she was a storyteller.

She was a storyteller, and after she died, my sister and I found poems all over the house. She would write them on different pieces of paper. Every time we found one, it was like a message from her.

The book deals with so much loss — of love, of life, of home, of country — and hardships. And yet it is infused with so much hope and purpose as Mara embarks on this quest and finds so much more than she bargained for.

the cover of the novel deeper than the ocean

“Deeper Than the Ocean” is Mirta Ojito’s debut novel.

Courtesy Hachette Book Group

Let me first deal with the issue of grief, because I think it’s important. At a certain point, it did become important for me to really talk about how hard women’s lives were, and continue to be, in many parts of the world. Even if you have a partner, it’s really, really hard to work full-time and have children. I know, I’ve done it. Now imagine doing that in the 1900s without a washing machine, without electricity, working the land. The animals. The farm. My mother always said, “It’s a wonder I’m alive.” Because she had to work so hard from childhood. My mother had no memory of her mother not being sick. [My grandmother] was always in pain, and despite the pain, she kept having kids. She had five kids. And she did everything in the house because her husband was away in la zafra, cutting sugar cane. So those were hard, hard times. And I wanted to honor that.

What do you hope readers who, like us, are past 50, will take away from this story?

I want people to enjoy the book for what it is. To get into the story. But for those of us lucky enough to have parents still alive, I’d say ask them questions about their past and ask them to tell you stories of their own parents. You will learn something that will maybe color the way you think of yourself.

Understanding a little bit where I come from certainly has changed the way I think about myself. Understanding that I am an immigrant, but that I also come from a long line of immigrants, has been important in my journey as a person and as a writer. I think if people can get that from the book, can recognize the importance of the past, that would be a win.

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