Rafael Yglesias - Fearless

“You’re fine, Max,” Debby said. “Let the Adrenalin work.”

Max rested on the oak floor and breathed easily. I’m alive, he thought. His throat eased and accepted a gulp of air.

I’m alive, he rejoiced. I’m alive. And I’m afraid.

Rafael Yglesias (b. 1954) is a master American storyteller whose career began with the publication of his first novel at seventeen. Through four decades of writing, Yglesias has produced numerous highly acclaimed novels and screenplays, and his fiction is distinguished by its clear-eyed realism and keen insight into human behavior. His books range in style and scope from novels of ideas, psychological thrillers, and biting satires, to self-portraits and portraits of New York society.

Yglesias was born and raised in Washington Heights, a working-class neighborhood in northern Manhattan. Both his parents were writers. His father, Jose, was the son of Cuban and Spanish parents and wrote articles for the New Yorker , the New York Times , and the Daily Worker , as well as novels. His mother, Helen, was the daughter of Yiddish-speaking Russian and Polish immigrants and worked as literary editor of the Nation . Rafael was educated mainly at public schools, but the Yglesiases did send him to the prestigious Horace Mann School for three years. Inspired by his parents’ burgeoning literary careers, Rafael left school in the tenth grade in order to finish his first book. The largely autobiographical Hide Fox, and All After (1972) is the story of a bright young student who drops out of private school against his parents’ wishes to pursue his artistic ambitions.

Many of Yglesias’s subsequent novels would also draw heavily from his own life experiences. Yglesias wrote The Work Is Innocent (1976), a novel that candidly examines the pressures of youthful literary success, in his early twenties. Hot Properties (1986) follows the up-and-down fortunes of young literary upstarts drawn to New York’s entertainment and media worlds. In 1977, Yglesias married artist Margaret Joskow and the couple had two sons: Matthew, now a renowned political pundit and blogger, and Nicholas, a science-fiction writer. Yglesias’s experiences as a parent in Manhattan would help shape Only Children (1988), a novel about wealthy and ambitious new parents in the city. Margaret would later battle cancer, which she died from in 2004. Yglesias chronicled their relationship in the loving, honest, and unsparing A Happy Marriage (2009).

After marrying Joskow, Ylgesias took nearly a decade away from writing novels to dedicate himself to family life. During this break from book-writing, Yglesias began producing screenplays. He would eventually have great success adapting his novel Fearless (1992), a story of trauma and recovery, into a critically acclaimed motion picture starring Jeff Bridges and Rosie Perez. Other notable screenplays and adaptations include From Hell, Les Misérables , and Death and the Maiden . He has collaborated with such directors as Roman Polanski and the Hughes brothers.

A lifelong New Yorker, Yglesias’s eye for city life — ambition, privilege, class struggle, and the clash of cultures — informs much of his work. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts are often primary characters in Yglesias’s narratives, and titles such as The Murderer Next Door (1991) and Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil (1998) draw heavily on the intellectual traditions of psychology.

Yglesias lives in New York’s Upper East Side.

Yglesias with Tamar Cole, his half-sister from his mother’s first marriage, around 1955. He was raised with Tamar and his half-brother, Lewis.

Yglesias sits atop his half-brother Lewis Cole’s shoulders around 1956. As adults, Yglesias and Cole worked together writing screenplays for ten years. All of them were sold, but none were ultimately made.

Yglesias at age ten, in a car with his mother in his father’s hometown of Ybor City in Tampa, Florida. Around this time, Yglesias lived in Spain for a year, an experience that proved formative in his young life.

Georgia Yglesias, Rafael’s paternal grandmother, is shown here relaxing in Central Park with Rafael and his father. Yglesias’s relationship with his grandmother was an important part of his childhood.

Pages from a travel book that Yglesias and his mother wrote together, dated from Paris in early October 1964. Though his mother did most of the writing, Yglesias considers this to be the first thing he ever wrote.

Yglesias typed and signed this letter in 1969, just months before beginning work on his first novel, Hide Fox, and All After (1972). The letter references Yglesias’s decision to drop out of school and begin writing fulltime, a biographical detail that is paralleled in Hide Fox .

A photo of Yglesias taken by his late wife, Margaret, in the early 1970s, the first summer they were together as a couple.

Yglesias with his parents at their summer house in Maine.

Yglesias and Cole on the front steps of Yglesias’s parents’ house in Maine in 1976, a short time before they began their decade-long writing collaboration.

Yglesias and film producer Paula Weinstein on the set of Fearless , a movie based on his book of the same name. The film, which starred Jeff Bridges, Isabella Rossellini, and Rosie Perez, was adapted for the screen by Yglesias and was hailed by critics upon its release in 1993.

Margaret and Yglesias with their two children, Matthew and Nicholas, shown here on a very happy vacation on Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas, around Christmas of 1993.

Yglesias and Matthew in an outtake from Jerry Bauer’s 1996 photo shoot with Yglesias before the publication of Dr. Neruda’s Cure for Evil . Matthew had come home from school in the midst of the shoot.