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Rafael Yglesias, now 17, readily admits Hide Fox is all but quibblingly autobiographic. "It is so close that at times it was hard to avoid writing my own name down—or rather to stop myself calling myself 'Raul' when I was talking to people." He adds, sounding very like Raul indeed: "Most of adolescence is unbelievably pretentious; yet psychologically adolescents are as complex as adults."
Yglesias was reading Dickens at age nine. Before he was 15, he had dropped out of Horace Mann, a highly regarded Bronx prep school resembling Cabot. Like his hero, he was an eager amateur actor who kept cutting classes, partly because school interfered with his writing and reading. Hide Fox owes not just its theme but the will to create if to art adolescent putting on of roles. "I very pompously told myself I was a writer at eight," he says. "Ever since then I kept a notebook and tried to keep myself writing in it. I started 200 novels, got two or three pages into each. But when I left Horace Mann I felt my back was against the wall. Fear, I guess, was what drove me to the torturous process writing really is."
He wrote most of the book in Maine, where his parents have a place, finishing it on his 16th birthday. He did not get any help from them on the book, but will shortly be in the odd position of comparing reviews with two other Yglesias novelists. His father Jose is the author of several books, including The Truth About Them (World), a just-published autobiographical novel about a Cuban-American clan. His mother Helen won this year's Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for her first novel How She Died, which appears next month. Says Rafael: "My relationship with my parents now—it was different when I first dropped out of school—is a very friendly one. We're all in this writing thing together. It has made a great camaraderie between us."
Rafael is deeply into the role of the adolescent writer—broke, living in a tiny railroad apartment, bathtub in the kitchen, mattress on the floor. "I've got interviews every day this week. Tomorrow the New York Times, Friday Seventeen (and just in time!)." He already has a 100-page start on a longer second novel, "not so autobiographical of course." Looking back: "I was fragments of an individual floating in space. I very much wanted to be an actor; but that's even harder of access than publishing, so I don't suppose I'll ever do it now that I have this start." Then another trial role flickers into place: "—unless somebody makes me an astonishing offer."