Eyes Open: An Interview with Author Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Thoroughly researched and resonant with our own times, Eyes Open is a historical novel in verse which follows on young woman’s coming of age during the Salazar dictatorship in 1960s Portugal. Sónia’s comfortable middle-class life is upended when her boyfriend is arrested for anti-government activities and her family’s restaurant is closed for its association with “undesirable” artists. Sónia is forced to leave school and take a low-paying job at a hotel laundry to support her family. There, she bonds with her coworkers and joins efforts to improve working conditions.

Today author Lyn Miller-Lachmann shares how she first came to learn about Portugal’s history, how her translation work influenced her poetry, and more. Photos are from Lyn’s travels in Portugal during April of 2024. Read on to download a free teaching guide!

Not many people are familiar with Portugal and its history. What drew you to this time and place?

In 2012 my husband received a Fulbright grant to teach sociology classes at a graduate institute of the University of Lisbon, so he and I moved to Portugal for the second half of that year. Each year thereafter until the pandemic, he and I returned to Lisbon for a couple of months so he could continue teaching. In 2014 the country celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that ended a 48-year right-wing dictatorship and created a stable democracy. I learned about life under the dictatorship, particularly the abominable conditions faced by women, agricultural and industrial workers, and migrants from both the countryside and Portugal’s colonies in Africa. I also learned about the wars that the dictatorship pursued in order to hold onto their colonies and how those wars ultimately contributed to the fall of the regime.

As a writer of historical fiction, I’m drawn to moments of great conflict  and the stories of people left out of textbooks. Sónia and her family and friends are ordinary people living under an almost medieval kind of rule, with all the power held by the government, the Catholic Church, and landowning and business elites.

You are an award-winning translator as well as an author. How did your work as a translator contribute to the writing of Eyes Open?

Multiple ways. Reading international books in translation from childhood on, living outside the U.S., and later becoming a translator piqued my interest in both global history and the experiences of young people growing up around the world today. Except for Moonwalking, my historical novels are set completely or partially outside the U.S. In 2016 I translated a picture book from Portuguese, Three Balls of Wool (Can Change the World), told from the point of view of a girl whose family had to flee Portugal in the middle of the night in the mid-1960s because of her parents’ political views. One of my background reference sources for that translation was a memoir written by a political exile from Portugal who, while imprisoned herself, facilitated a dramatic escape of several other prisoners. Her book gave me a sense of what life was like for dissidents and political prisoners like Sónia’s boyfriend as well as the idea for one of the book’s key events.

Why did you choose to write Eyes Open in verse?

An earlier version of Eyes Open was my first effort at a verse novel, even before I started writing Moonwalking. I didn’t choose the format as much as my protagonist chose it for me. Sónia was a secondary character in an earlier novel (not a verse novel), where she was best known for writing poems to honor her activist boyfriend and starting a poetry club at her all-girls’ Catholic school. It became a very popular club, to the consternation of her family and the school administration. Because Sónia writes hers and her boyfriend’s stories in poetry, the verse novel made sense. I was inspired by Elizabeth Acevedo’s groundbreaking YA novel The Poet X, which also features a teenage girl who uses poetry to find her voice and escape the constraints in her life.

What role does music play in your novel?

Music is closely tied to Sónia’s poetry. She’s grown up around music. Her extended family owns a fado restaurant featuring live music every night. Fado is a uniquely Portuguese musical genre often compared to the blues in the U.S. The rhythms of Sónia’s poetry, its repetition and motifs, and its themes of longing and loss, are drawn from fado. At the same time, she and her friends are captivated by this new music coming from Britain and the U.S., the rock and roll of The Beatles and their pop spinoffs like The Monkees. Bubbly mid-1960s pop-rock is about as far from fado as it gets, but Sónia’s poems draw from both these musical strands as she defiantly embraces the moments of joy and humor in an otherwise harsh life.

What was the most surprising thing you learned from researching or writing Eyes Open?

When Sónia is forced to leave school and work in a hotel laundry facility, she meets a coworker her age, Zuleika, who migrated to Lisbon from Cape Verde, which at that time was one of the colonies in Africa that Portugal’s dictatorship was fighting a war to keep. Cape Verde (known in Portugal and officially as Cabo Verde) is a chain of islands some distance from the coast of Africa and was used by Portuguese merchants of slavery as a way station from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries. Cape Verde’s population is descended from Black Africans who brought their stories to the island, including tales of Ti Lobo (Uncle Wolf) and we know these stories were brought from somewhere else because there are no indigenous wolves on the islands. One of the poems in Eyes Open speculates on how Ti Lobo got there, and it’s a subtle dig at colonialism and imperialism.

What was your hardest challenge in writing Eyes Open?

Even though this was my first verse novel, that wasn’t my biggest challenge. The poems seemed to flow naturally as I delved deeper into Sónia’s character and the personalities of the people who surrounded her. Even so, she’s a big departure from my other protagonists in that I tend to write boy protagonists and have struggled to create complex and likeable girl protagonists who aren’t autistic like me. Sónia isn’t neurodivergent. She’s popular with the other girls and makes friends easily, which isn’t at all like I was when I was her age. She’s not the kind of girl who would have been friends with me growing up, so it took a lot more thinking and observation of others to capture her personality and make her what she is for me—the kind of girl I wish I’d been, for better and worse.

Was it hard to follow Torch with a book that’s so different in style?

Like Eyes Open, Torch’s narrative style grew out of its characters, story, and setting. Torch involves a collective protagonist – multiple point of view characters whose fates become intertwined in the course of the story, so much so that they become a single protagonist. Eyes Open is about a girl coming to use her voice for herself, and not in service to the boys in her life. In her society, girls and women had no rights. They couldn’t even travel without the permission of a husband or father. Speaking out against this injustice through poetry is a form of resistance, and so is having dreams and writing about them, as Sónia writes about wanting to create children’s books and follow in the footsteps of a well-known Portuguese woman poet – who happens to enjoy far more privilege than Sónia ever will.

How does the history you write about in Eyes Open connect to the present day?

In the U.S., we’re seeing the curtailment of women’s rights, particularly the rights of women to control our own bodies. Draconian restrictions on reproductive health care following the Dobbs decision go beyond abortion to all aspects of family planning. Furthermore, many states are enacting or considering travel restrictions, much like the restrictions that Portuguese women faced under the dictatorship.

We hear today that democracy is too slow and cumbersome to work and we need a strongman to take control. Portugal had strongman rule for 48 years. Their dictators kept the country poor and backward, drove millions of the best and brightest into exile, crushed the dreams and talents of generations of women, and fought brutal and unpopular colonial wars in Africa for two decades. It’s easy to slide into a tyranny and difficult and painful to get out of one.

Praise for Eyes Open

★ “Beautifully and fluidly written, Miller-Lachmann’s memorable verse novel captures the setting splendidly, dramatizing the abysmal condition of women under the dictatorship.”—starred, Booklist

★ “The verse format allows Sónia’s poetic voice to shine, drawing readers into the stark reality she’s dealing with. . . Conveys harshness, beauty—and lingering hope.”—starred, Kirkus Reviews

“Employing tightly bound poems, Miller-Lachman weaves the perils of authoritarianism into the dynamics between Sónia and her family, and highlights Sónia’s activist awakening and the power of protest.”—Publishers Weekly

Free Educator Resources

Download the free teaching guide to engage readers beyond the page! A discussion guide is also available on the Lerner website.

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