It took novelist Miguel Syjuco over a decade to complete I Was the President&rsquo;s Mistress!!, the sequel to his Man Asian Literary Prize-winning debut, Ilustrado. The ambitious satire about power, corruption, and sex &mdash; written from the voice of the president&rsquo;s former paramour, Vita Nova &mdash; will hit the shelves in April 2022, a month before the Philippines&rsquo; most important election in recent history.

Miguel Syjuco deleted his social media accounts. He had to get back to being a novelist and carve out a space for himself far from all the noise and doomscrolling. &ldquo;It was a tough thing to do, given how engaged and interested I have been in the past years with what was happening in the Philippines and for us Filipinos in the diaspora,&rdquo; he says. When he&rsquo;s not on duty as a professor at New York University Abu Dhabi, he&rsquo;s usually on the ground covering the drug war &mdash; going with the nightcrawlers, visiting crime scenes, and interviewing people who were undergoing rehabilitation for addiction.
 But he knew he had to return to fiction. It&rsquo;s his way of inching closer to the truth. &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve unreal created characters who resonate with real life. This kaleidoscope of fiction refracts things that might seem familiar, and I hope that familiarity can make us a little bit more focused on reality.&rdquo; The book, described as putting &ldquo;the sensational in sensationalistic,&rdquo; follows the tell-all story of Vita Nova, President Fernando V. Estregan&rsquo;s ex-lover. Estregan is a movie star, boxer, and an ousted-at-some-point womanizer who circles a ring of formidable allies and rivals including a Koran-toting nemesis, a horny bishop, a cowboy turned warlord, and a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty.
 Though Miguel&rsquo;s fury can be felt through his speech and unflinching prose, one can also intuit his sense of hope. He admits it might be his naivete talking. But perhaps, stubborn belief in positive outcomes is what makes writers and patriots the real optimists of this world because underneath their discontent, they're the ones with the drive to probe and realize society's collective fate.&nbsp;

It took a while for your second novel to be completed. Why is that? I envision writing a trilogy about my experience of the Philippines, particularly where I was born. I left in 2001, but I was always returning constantly, like many Filipinos. Ilustrado, for me, was an exploration of my role as a writer in the society to examine the past, interrogate the present, and imagine what the future could be.&nbsp;

Ilustrado was the past &mdash; 120 years of Philippine history focused on a certain sector of Philippine society throughout those decades, mostly the sort of empowered class who have failed us constantly over the decades &mdash; failed to really engage Filipinos more in having a share in informing and leading our country.
 I Was the President&rsquo;s Mistress!! is the present, and in many ways, that makes it the sequel to Ilustrado. It makes Vita Nova, who was quite a minor character in Ilustrado, the major character...Thanks to feedback from readers, I realized that Ilustrado was a very male-centered book. So if the female characters are in the margins, I thought, let&rsquo;s take the one who was most rejected and make her the focus of I Was the President&rsquo;s Mistress!! I presented myself with a great challenge to write a main character whose experiences were very different from mine and had to learn how to do that responsibly.
 Angst is one of the most perceptible tones from Ilustrado. Would you say that you&rsquo;ve mellowed in your writing or you&rsquo;re still angry? I&rsquo;ve mellowed in many ways. I&rsquo;d like to think that I&rsquo;ve outgrown my angst. I wrote Ilustrado in my late twenties, which was a really angsty time. I Was the President&rsquo;s Mistress!! is angry &mdash; maybe more so, but there&rsquo;s less angst here. I believe it&rsquo;s infused with a sense of urgency, and it&rsquo;s an exhortation towards responsibility, both as human beings, but also as citizens, as voters, as people who are fed up with the system...Because this democracy thing didn&rsquo;t work with 30 years of it. We didn&rsquo;t really have 30 proper years of it. It&rsquo;s a dictatorship of dynasties. As a novelist, my role is to imagine the future, and a way forward from all that. I have to unpack that and challenge the reader to ask: what can I do?

My role as a writer in the society is to examine the past, interrogate the present, and imagine what the future could be.&nbsp;

As a writer, you seek truth and present it as objectively as you can. However, you&rsquo;re also criticized for your privilege. How do you feel about that? I&rsquo;ve been dealing with it my entire life. My answer comes from two places, both as a frustrated fellow Filipino, who says: rightly so, we should judge those from the privileged class who historically, over the centuries, failed us and refused to share their privilege, access, and power. At the same time, I try to share my perspective from my own point of view. I&rsquo;ve wanted to explore the disaffection and that shared sense of powerlessness, even from that particular class in the society. I wanted to make it a compassionate indictment...I think if we&rsquo;re going to condemn or hold to account or engage with a particular group of people, then we have to understand the nuance behind it, not so that we pity them, but so that we can understand the larger issues at play.&nbsp;
 Writing can really be an act of faith, faith in the self, and, very much so, faith in the reader. There might be people who will try to cancel me, but I believe that we have every right to censure those we disagree with. Writers have to stand for freedom of expression for all. I&rsquo;m prepared for those challenges, and I also trust the readers who will very kindly, and with great faith, opt to share their time and read my book, to consider my ideas.
 Tell us about your growth as a writer. If anyone looks at my work, particularly my fiction, it&rsquo;s not about the changes the character goes through. I&rsquo;m always trying to shift the reader&rsquo;s expectations, or make it about the sort of the realizations that the reader has at the end, by using all the mechanisms of fiction. When you get to the end, I want a change in perspective or maybe even principles and values. I want that to come from the reader. I want it to be challenging and not just to entertain. I want it to be like, &lsquo;Okay, I&rsquo;m going to read Ilustrado now, and I&rsquo;m going to read it maybe with some friends, and we&rsquo;re going to talk about it.'&nbsp;
 With Ilustrado, there were some things in it that only Filipinos will get, but there were also things in it that perhaps more international readers would appreciate. With I Was the President&rsquo;s Mistress!!, I wanted to write something more for us Filipinos at home and across the diaspora. I&rsquo;ve grown to reassess my priorities as a writer. Whether or not this book gets published or read abroad is a bonus for me. What really matters is that it becomes a conversation starter for us Filipinos.

How should we face 2022 and the upcoming elections? We should face it with great courage&mdash;to stand for what we believe in, to place our hope, but also make clear our demands to our rulers. We should see this as an opportunity, regardless of who wins, to participate in that democracy, to register, at the very least, to vote, absolutely, to discuss, to examine, to debate, to hold accountable in that way. Out of all the people who are standing and asking for the privilege of leading us, we may not get the result we deserve or want, but I don&rsquo;t think we should face that with hopelessness. I think our engaging is, in a way, the beginning of a victory itself. It&rsquo;s a hopeful, courageous act. It&rsquo;s also a necessary act if we are to build the kind of society that we want that includes all of us... It is with that courage and conviction in the potential of this broken system, that &mdash; if we are able to join it, in however capacity we can &mdash; that eventually it will include all of us more, and together we can begin to fix it. I know it&rsquo;s such a hopeful, almost naive thing to say, but the alternatives are pretty dire. As Winston Churchill said, &ldquo;Democracy is the worst form of government &mdash; except for all the others.&rdquo; &nbsp;

Miguel Syjuco Finds a Way Forward with His Second Novel, I Was the President's Mistress!!

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