Writing fiction in a second—and even third—language is a literary choice that has a long history: Joseph Conrad, Milan Kundera, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, among many others, wrote masterpieces in languages different than their own.

For me, writing my first novel in my second language was not a choice. I conceived the idea for Tales from the Town of Widows originally in Spanish. I even wrote a few pages of it in Spanish, but it didn’t feel right. I don’t know how to explain it: I wanted to write a novel about Colombia that took place in Colombia, and yet it didn’t seem natural to write it in Spanish. I put the idea aside, then joined the creative writing graduate program at Columbia University and began writing short stories in English—I could write English, only not idiomatically or precisely, much less beautifully. But I couldn’t delay the idea forever, and in my second year at Columbia I decided to give it another chance. I wrote a short story called “The Other Widow,” in English, because it was for school and the weekly workshops were obviously conducted in English.

The story was terrible and the grammar was wrong, and yet I felt good about it. English, I realized, offered me an unconventional perspective on the Colombian conflict. It made me more detached from patriotism and sentimentality, and therefore more unbiased to convey my own points of view in my writing. I kept redrafting that first story until I thought it was good. Then I wrote and rewrote several more stories that eventually became chapters of the novel. I, however, continued doing all the thinking in Spanish, translating those thoughts into English before putting them in writing. In fact, I wrote the entire novel with the help of an unabridged English-Spanish dictionary, and of a good writer friend who worked as my “unofficial” editor/proofreader.

When I read Maureen Dowd’s column, my initial reaction was one of gratitude and relief. It’s nice to know that, while chick lit books aren’t selling as well as they used to, the genre is still successful enough to tick off the literary elitists: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, animosity is a close second.

Once the giddiness elicited by Dowd’s harsh critique subsided, I started thinking about the issues raised in her piece. For instance, Dowd was indignant to find that her local bookstore had the audacity to put Sophie Kinsella’s books next to Rudyard Kipling’s. I can see her point. How dare they shelve their books in alphabetical order? Everybody knows that they should be organized in order of greatness. They should start with Lynn Schnurnberger’s The Botox Diaries and work their way up to Dante’s Inferno.

And of course she’s right to be horrified by the pink cover put on Romeo And Juliet. It would be awful if someone who wouldn’t normally read Shakespeare became compelled to pick up one of his greatest plays because of its new girly cover. Shakespeare’s plays should all be bound in black so that those who buy them can flaunt their somber attitude about literature, even if what they’re reading is a play about a guy with a donkey head being romanced by the queen of the fairies.