Writing Communities: The Man Who Played Hache Carrillo

Bethanne Patrick:
Here’s an important question we continue to encounter as we explore today’s story:

“Why do some authors lie?” 

The answer may, at times, relate to book sales. All authors know that a little embellishment can make a good story great. When taken too far, however, story enhancements can alter history – and that can matter a great deal even when an author is writing fiction. 

Especially when the story enhancements involve the author’s own life. 

One of the strangest cases involved an author I knew, and one I liked very much. No one ever suspected him of lying. During his career, he worked as a professor in the MFA program at George Washington University. He was also chair of the PEN Faulkner Foundation, and that’s how I met him. We were both members of the board.

And that author was a man named Hache Carrillo

LISA PAGE:
I do think that he was also brilliant. You know, he did some really good things for PEN/ Faulkner, you know, he put the focus on Latino students in, in DC public schools, which had never been done before. No other PEN/Faulkner board member had ever approached that subject or been even concerned about those children. 

Bethanne Patrick:
And that was really something that was immediately apparent to me. Of course there were so many esteemed writers I was excited to connect with from the start, but Hache Carrillo was someone I especially looked forward to knowing better. 

People talked about him with utmost respect, and one of the things that happens on any board anywhere is that some board members do a lot of the heavy lifting and some don't. Carrillo was known as someone who was right in there doing the work. He was really serious in how he approached all of it. During our meetings, many people sort of saw him as the foundation’s moral center. 

But of course, all meetings went completely online in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down.

In those early online meetings, there was just this enormous sadness about the events occurring all around us. And even though Carrillo wouldn’t bring it up, it was apparent by his physical changes that he was ill. Although I didn’t know the details, colleagues shared that he had cancer. Then one day in April, we board members received a message that he had died of complications from covid-19.

Shortly after, there was another message…this one even more unexpected.

Carrillo’s obituary had been published and then quickly revised by the Washington Post. His family had told the publication it was filled with lies. Hache Carrillo had been born in Detroit, not Havana. He was not of Cuban descent, and his birth name was Herman Glenn Carroll.

I had no idea…. No one on board knew… Not even his husband had known Carrillo’s true background. 

Welcome back to Missing Pages. I’m your host, literary critic and writer Bethanne Patrick. This is the podcast where we examine some of the most surprising, industry-shaking controversies in the literary world and try to make sense of them. 

This is the second episode in a series on writing communities and the final episode of our second season. Typically, when telling stories like this one, the tendency is to lean into the con of it all –  to try and explain how it was that a Big Bad Wolf got away with the unthinkable. Is fraud ever justified? And if not, why do so many people who knew Hache Carrillo personally seem to carry his memory in such a positive light?

In this episode, we’ll examine the difference between Carrillo’s origins and the lies he built his life into, then we’ll talk to two writers who knew him best, exploring the nuance and implication of his actions. 

Chapter 1: The Crafting of a Costume

LISA PAGE:
The term is academic fraud. But it was also that, you know, he had sort of lived this lie, um, with all of us who were his friends, his colleagues, his husband, um, you know, this was, this was something that the wider world believed that he had worked very hard to get the wider world to believe.

Bethanne Patrick:
That is Lisa Page, the Director of Creative Writing at George Washington University. Page worked with Hache Carrillo for many years 

LISA PAGE:
I was very shocked and then I was very sad. Particularly around the issue of being African American., um, and turning, I mean, building a literary reputation, and sort of issuing your African American heritage right, did upset me very much. Hache and I had many conversations about his life in Cuba, his relatives there. You know, I told him I am African American, but I told him I was very often mistaken for Latina. And he said, “I thought you were.” Things like this where I found myself revisiting a lot of our conversations, a lot of the stories he told me, a lot of the lies he told.”

Bethanne Patrick:
When Carrillo’s obituary was published, questions and disputes rang out online echoing a sense of betrayal. One poet who became friends with Carrilllo at Cornell claimed he played with her vulnerable feelings surrounding her identity. The former department head at George Washington University said that even if the deception was spun charismatically, that didn’t make lying admirable. 

Carrillo’s obituary said he was a Cuban immigrant who’d been raised in the U.S. after his family fled the government of Fidel Castro. And that was what they saw reported in his obituary, which specified that in 1967, the late H. G. Carrillo fled Cuba with his father, a physician, his mother, an educator, and his three siblings. By way of Spain and Florida, they wound up in Michigan, where Carrillo soon became a touring piano prodigy.

This backstory was what his partner knew of his early life, and his partner had approved its facts for the obituary. But then, Carrillo’s family of origin found the article.

That evening, Carrillo’s niece Jessica Webley read the obituary. 

As the daughter of Hache Carrillo’s younger sister Susan, Jessica had known him as crazy Uncle Glenn – who at one point, insisted she call him Tío, Spanish for “uncle.” But his love for the Spanish language simply seemed to be part of his quirky charm. 

Carrillo’s family had seen his first book come out and they saw the assortment of falsehoods on his Wikipedia page while he was alive, but when he died, they figured a reporter would come to them to get the real story on the man they knew as Glenn. 

But the facts printed in the obituary had come from his partner, who hadn’t known Carrillo’s true origins.

Anxious to get the story corrected, Jessica left a comment on the article claiming its contents were a complete misrepresentation of her uncle.

It was the beginning of an exposé no one had been prepared for…And for those who ran in Carrillo's circles, emails and texts flew at lightning speed.

When Carrillo’s family came forward to share what they remembered of their dear Glenn, it became clear that his public name was merely the seed of his deceptions. 

The truth came out that Hache Carrillo was a Black man from Detroit, with no Cuban heritage. And no one in his family was of Cuban descent.

His identity as an author was a character he played. And while at first glance, some might say that makes him a con man who built his success on stories of struggles he never actually had, it’s hardly that simple.To understand how Hache Carrillo came to be, we need to go back in time. 

In the early 1990s, English-speaking anthropologists had just begun to publish scholarly work on Cuban folk music and dance. Within the decade, Afro-Cuban art was trending for the very first time in America’s urban regions. Chicago was among them. 

On a given night there in 1995, the city’s concert halls would boast performances by Cuban-American singer-songwriter Jon Secada and King of Latin Jazz, Tito Puente.

That same year, a 35-year-old Black man by the name of Herman Glenn Caroll enrolled at DePaul, a private Catholic university, located in a neighborhood called Lincoln Park. In this episode, I’ll be referring to Herman as “Hache,” as that’s how the world came to know him.

by his mid-thirties, he was attending a school with close proximity to a booming arts scene, rich with some of the country’s very first Afro-Cuban lounges.

Warm atmospheres with cigar smoke, live music, and dancing enchanted Carrillo, who navigated the scene in the company of his fellow classmate, Tiffany Villa-Ignacio. Early on in their friendship, Tiffany told him she wanted to explore her Latin roots. 

To Carrillo, their connection felt fated. Because, as he confided in her, he was trying to do the same. For the next five years, while he studied Spanish and English, he frequented the local Cuban clubs, where the country’s classic musical stylings of bolero and danzón frequently played. 

He kept the company of a Colombian boyfriend, who taught him how to make “arroz con pollo,” and in the summer of 1998, he took an introductory Spanish course.

All of this factored into the writing he slowly began to share with professors and students in his department. One of his works titled “Snow/Yellow Food/Brown People, Miami y Los Santos in an Absence of History” featured a young Cuban-American man whose younger sister rejects her Cuban background to fit in with her friends. She’s relieved when she can front as “just Black.” 
The character initially feels bad about his heritage until a priest shows him a book on Cuban history, empowering him to own it.

Around the same time he wrote this, Carrillo began telling people that he was Cuban. 

His shift from Herman Carroll to Hache Carrillo was solidified when he told his professor, “You know, my name was taken from me. My heritage. And I’m changing it back to Hermán Carrillo.”

He shortened Hermán to just Hache, the Spanish pronunciation of the letter “H”.

It was a new racial identity, invented under the pretense of a self-acceptance that had been a long time coming. He shared his truth with others in a way that made it sound like he was only just stepping into himself, and in a way he was. His love for Cuban culture had awakened him to something real in himself.

LISA PAGE
I knew Hache Carrillo at George Washington University first, and then later worked with him at the PEN Faulkner Foundation.”

Bethanne Patrick:
Some colleagues asked themselves why Carrillo would create a new identity. Page, who is a Black woman, co-edited a book called “We Wear the Mask,” which is about racial passing. She spoke about Hache Carrillo’s story in light of that phenomenon.

LISA PAGE
So one thing, you know, that certainly happened to me in the Midwest and I didn't grow up in Detroit. I grew up in Chicago, but. Certainly happened to me, um, was an awareness of not being very special for being black. a lot of Latinos because many of them were being published in the literary world. And there were African American writers being published, but we hadn't started with Black Lives Matter yet. There wasn't that boom, boom, boom. To the publishing industry that, you know, you need to publish these stories too. There wasn't that pressure. And so the African American story was still a pretty monolithic story.

Bethanne Patrick:
According to researchers Ann Hartness and Margo Guitierrez, ““Latino literature in the 1990s [came] into its own, finally recognized by mainstream publishers as legitimate.” 

That’s an undeniable statement that I can support from my own reading experience in those years.

We saw books like “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros, “How The Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” by Julia Alvarez, and “The House of the Spirits” by Isabel Allende become New York Times bestsellers. 

We saw Oscar Hijuelos win a Pulitzer for his novel “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.”

OSCAR HIJUELOS:
“I talk to my brother Jose about this and we both agree we grew up having to overcome a feeling of second-classness.”

Bethanne Patrick:
And Junot Díaz, published his first short story collection “Drown” in 1995, detailing the struggles of Dominican immigrants. 

His work incorporates Spanglish, stemming from his own experience being bilingual. 

JUNOT DIAZ :
“When I’m writing, I tend to have both of them running through my head and the one that bullies through the most, because English is what I write in, but Spanish and English are what I think and speak in. So in my head, Spanish will always seize control, it’s the really angry driver, like passenger who grabs the wheel. So any time I’m writing in English, Spanish is like “Enough” (Speaking Spanish) Suddenly it just comes in.”

Bethanne Patrick:
Does identification with a group give anyone the right to claim a new identity? 

Three decades before Carrillo arrived at DePaul, he was growing up in Detroit with his two sisters and one brother, supported by his parents, who were both public-school teachers. He witnessed harsh events including the riots of 1967, which started when police raided a bar and arrested 85 African Americans. 

When civilians fought back, protesting the unwarranted brutality, 43 were killed – 33 of whom were African American. These riots highlighted the extreme segregation that was very much a part of Detroit’s daily life at that time.

Carrillo’s parents weren’t separated from it. They both supported Black businesses when shopping. They also hung the Black Liberation flag outside of their house.

To those around him, much of his personhood was rooted in his sexual identity. He always knew who he was – and could get heated defending it. 

When harassed for taking ballet and tap classes at age eight, he responded by beating up his critic.

Another early habit of his were the characters he played.

HACHE’S SISTER SUSAN - THE NEW YORKER RADIO HOUR:
“We loved Halloween and dressing up. He’s an angel. And you’re? A princess.”

Bethanne Patrick:
That’s his sister, Susan, in a clip from the New Yorker Radio Hour. She’s reflecting on the multiple occasions where her brother’s stories got out of hand.

Once, when Carrillo’s mom went in for parent-teacher conferences, an eleventh grade instructor told her that her son was going by the name “Marx.” He used it to sign his papers and wouldn’t explain why.

He also told his friends a variety of lies – including that his father was famous, his sister had been adopted from Asia, and that he was helping teach math to students when he wasn’t. These bits of fantasy sprinkled into his truth became more prevalent in his 20s, as he got involved in a series of romantic relationships.

He told one partner he had a son with a French woman and showed signed greeting cards from the child, which were fake. He said that he was writing for The New Yorker when he, in fact, wasn’t. He told another partner he had degrees from Dartmouth and the University of Chicago.

When applying for jobs, he told HBO he had a Bachelors degree when he didn’t. They hired him as the Director of Staff Development at a call center. Though he oversaw fewer than a hundred employees in this role, he later would state that he managed 2000 people.

After he left that job, for reasons that remain unknown, he told people he’d been working in television in Manhattan. HBO is a cable television company, and the broadness of Carrillo’s claim isn’t so much a lie as a conveniently-worded intimation. But the job wasn’t in Manhattan. It was in Chicago.

It seems that Hache Carrillo was trying to wipe out significant details of his life by replacing them with ones he found more interesting and beautiful. But it wasn’t just the big things he’d lie about. A former roommate of Carrillo’s recalls that he asked her to get more milk from the store by telling her he’d had a bowl of cornflakes and they were out of milk, even though neither of them ever had cornflakes.

If we subtract the falsehoods, a simpler story emerges. 

Hache Carrillo moved to Chicago in 1984, when he was 24-years-old. He had a lover who died of AIDS in 1988. And in 1995, following his six-year stint working at a call center for HBO, he enrolled at DePaul. 

That brings us back to the birth of the lie that became him. The one in which he was an Afro-Cuban immigrant, whose family fled Fidel Castro in 1967. But what happens when the liar gets acclaim?

Chapter Two: Playing the Part

In 2000, Hache Carrillo graduated from DePaul University and was soon admitted to Cornell University for its combined M.F.A. / Ph.D. program.

His application had included the prose of a character who had come to his mind one night while he was out at Chicago’s Café Bolero.” It was this character that he would revisit every Friday night for four years, while he was out at that cafe, allowing his mind to wander. He was solidifying certain aspects of this made-up person’s identity.

Over the next three years, he spent much of his time at Cornell pulling from that character to create his first book “Loosing My Espanish,” but he also wrote and received awards for his short stories.

LISA PAGE:
Well I read ‘Loosing My Espanish’ and I did appreciate it. I also read some of his short stories, which I actually liked more. I thought that they were more concentrated, more structured, made a greater impact, more literary to me. But I also really enjoyed. Sort of feelings about other writers and activism around particularly Latino writers and other writers of color. 

Bethanne Patrick:
And was he exploring similar themes in those short stories? Was the Afro-Cuban background at the center of that work as well?

LISA PAGE:
Well, what he wrote about was migrants from Cuba. He wrote about alienation. He wrote about being queer as well.  He was very sort of fluid in terms of describing that sense of being, attached to a country and yet detached from a country. And his sort of sense of the importance of history and culture which I admire deeply.

Bethanne Patrick:
To be clear, Carrillo’s Afro-Cuban identity remained central to his writing from this point forward. It had also become apparent in his wardrobe choices and self-expression. He wore billowy guayabera shirts. He spoke with a slight accent. And he drew people in with his sensory references to his imagined, adopted culture. 

Louis Bayard, a novelist who met Carrillo later in his life, noticed the fullness of Carrillo’s cultural performance.

LOUIS BAYARD:
His life is a love letter of sorts to the Cuban people, to the Cuban culture, to Cuban history for sure. He clearly admired it. I think that's why he took it on in the way they did. There's something almost mythological about, you know, taking on the clothes, the skin of, something someone you admire, um, making it your own. 

His emails are full of Spanish salutations that he sprinkled everything he wrote with some sort of Spanish idiom or other, and again, it, it left me feeling, oh, this is, you know, but what a bilingual writer will do is his native language will just sprinkle its way, find its way through, and knowing now what you do, it's like, wow, he was performing that he was not willing to ever drop the mask. He wanted everyone to know it at every moment, his alleged history.

Bethanne Patrick: 
Right, there seems to be a devotional act involved in making it such a total part of his identity that he’s performing it even in small moments when it would seem painstaking or even arbitrary to include it.

LOUIS BAYARD:
I love Cuban food too, but I wouldn't try to pass myself off as Cuban. I'm, there are a lot of cultures that I'm very responsive to, but I'm also conscious as a white, cisgender guy. I'm not gonna pretend that that is my world or that is my tradition, my lore. Um, so yeah, it's, it's really tricky and it's really complicated because in Hache's case, race enters into it as well.

Bethanne Patrick:
Carrillo’s choice to perform a Cuban background really is complicated…especially when we consider that he went through his own experience as a marginalized person, without wearing the added costume he designed for himself. 

And while it’s hard to say whether he ever coped with any ethical qualms about the act, the performance only grew more necessary after he published his first novel “Loosing My Espanish” in 2004.

That first year, Hache Carrillo’s book captured the hearts and minds of readers, finding resonance with many Latin American writers and immigrants.

Among the glowing reviews were those from Mayra Montero, Eduardo Galeano, and Junot Díaz, all successful authors in their own right. 

Diaz said “Mr. Carrillo’s talents are formidable, his lyricism pitch-perfect, and his compassion limitless.” 

But that’s not to say the Spanish itself was totally right. His mentor Helena Maria Viramontes recalled that there was a clumsiness to it. In her mind, that was just par for the course as someone who had adapted to an English-speaking country so early in their life. It’s easy to see how Carrillo’s Spanish errors would have gone overlooked. People weren’t scanning his book for accuracy. They were scanning it for feeling…and the emotions it captured did contain something powerful. Maybe those were the moments where Carrillo was letting a bit of his truth shine through.

The full truth, however, from this point forward, had become a no fly zone for Carrillo. Suddenly, he wasn’t just performing to his professors and colleagues. 

Having established himself in the literary world as an Afro-Cuban immigrant, there was no going back. The only people who did know who he really was, now, were the exes of his past, who he didn’t keep up with, and his family members…who did receive a copy of his book.

When looking at the dedications, his siblings were surprised to see that Carrillo had adjusted each of their names to sound more Cuban. Susan was changed to Susana. Christopher to Cristobal. Maria stayed Maria. 
While they understood that Hache had built himself into an Afro-Cuban identity, they kept their distance from media reports about his professional life.

Who Was H.G. Carrillo WNYC Clip:
I guess not that many people, or maybe they do, know love like our family. You know people are like didn’t you ask and I don’t know why, we just, you accept someone for who they are and you love them anyways.

Bethanne Patrick:
In their minds, the media didn’t have all the facts and the whole character-performance was just Glenn being Glenn. It wouldn’t make them stop loving him.

But after the book came out, Carrillo’s story became even more public, and his career leveled up with his newfound notoriety.

Just three years after his first book came out, in 2007, he was hired to be an assistant professor of English at George Washington University. Here’s a rare interview clip where he actually talks about why he took the job. 

HACHE Carrillo INTERVIEW 2012:
“So how long have you been teaching writing? Not all writers are teachers. How does that fit into what you do?” “Well, you know, it’s one of those things where you want to have a conversation or discussion with people. And before I taught, I actually worked for television and I wanted to have conversations with adults about books and about writing. And I thought well probably the easiest way would to be you know to go back to school and to train so that I could actually teach and talk to adults about books.”

Bethanne Patrick:
During his time at George Washington University, he did talk to adults about books. And a lot of them were young adults, majoring in English – students of his who were still looking for a sign that creative writing was the path they were meant to take. 

Some former students say that Carrillo gave them that affirmation. Like Paula Meijia who also says he pushed her to be a better writer. Quite a few other budding writers experienced this in his classes. They’ve shared that he would give out his cellphone number on the first day of class, letting them know they could call him for anything, even if they were “tripping on acid at 3 a.m.”

He sent gifts to students on occasion with words of encouragement. He wrote countless letters of recommendation and was always tracking which masters programs his students had been admitted to. He was also particularly impactful with students grappling with their cultural identities.

LISA PAGE:
He brought agency to those students who were struggling with English not being their first language, for instance, or that they didn't have any confidence in their storytelling ability, you know, was able to banish that to encourage them to push them. I mean to mentor them, he really did all that.

Bethanne Patrick:
I want to pause here to reflect on the depth of character it takes to connect with and support students at this level. I’ve been teaching in the Literature Department of American University’s College of Arts and Sciences, and I know first-hand how vital that professor-student relationship can be for someone still finding their way in writing. 

Grad students in MFA programs are not only really looking to their professors as instructors, but also as professional role models for their future work. And I will say first and foremost that I am pretty sure many of Carrillo’s students revered him completely. I think his teaching, his presence in person was authentic, regardless of the identity he was quote - performing- end quote.

You can’t really fake that kind of connection with students.

At the same time, there were people in the program who seemed to notice Carrillo’s larger than life stories were less than transparent.

Bethanne Patrick:
Did you ever notice when he would lie?

LOUIS BAYARD:
He told me once that he was married to the heiress of the diamond nut fortune. And that was just outlandish enough at the time that I thought, oh, okay. I mean, nobody would make that up. Right? That's easily checked. And so I didn't even bother checking, cause I thought, okay, well nobody would say that unless it really happened.

Bethanne Patrick:
You know you’d think he’d be afraid of people fact-checking him on those things. It’s as though in saying something so far-fetched with such conviction, it was just easier to believe him than to not. I am wondering, though, what did it look like in moments where people were noticing that Hache was lying about something?

LOUIS BAYARD:
I do remember a colleague of mine, and I, I won't name him, but a conversation with him some years back where he said, you know, you can't believe a word that comes out of Hache's mouth. So I think he did have a reputation for, you know, Being fanciful, uh, maybe f fabricating some things here and there, but I, I don't know if anybody who questioned the, the actual birth story, the whole growing up story, there were other elements, the diamond nut airs part that maybe people might have questioned.

Bethanne Patrick:
It’s possible colleagues of Carrillo’s called him out. If they did, no one knew about it. And for six years, Hache Carrillo’s life as an assistant professor at George Washington seemed full of positive relationships and pivotal teaching lessons.

But in 2013, George Washington University did not renew his contract.

They cited his lack of publications.

Though he claimed he was working on a second book throughout his time there, he’d released only a handful of short stories.

LOUIS BAYARD:
It occurs to me that it's because his life was so fictional that all of the energy that might have gone into actually writing fiction went into sustaining the fiction of his day-to-day existence. You know, because that's all I can think about is how exhausting it would've been to be Hache Carrillo, to be putting this person out into the world at all times. I would've found it exhausting. Um, but maybe it just became so second nature to him that he just rolled with it. I don't know. But it, he certainly didn't disseminate a lot of work in the last 15 years of his life.

Bethanne Patrick:
After George Washington, Carrillo did not go back to academia.

Instead, he got married to a Dutch-born beekeeper in 2015…a statement that almost feels like one of Carrillo’s fibs…but isn’t. 
The next year, he secured a board post at the PEN Faulkner Foundation, where we met. 

He was tasked with organizing the judging process for the annual PEN Faulkner award.
Before long, Carrillo became chair of the foundation, a prestigious role that came with its fair share of work and he did all of it
And though his background was less than transparent, I found myself sad that he wasn’t able to continue the work and I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.

Chapter 3: Remembering Both

Louis Bayard wrote a debut play called “Sheboygan,”  about a writer whose loved ones must come to terms with his lies in the aftermath of his death.

LOUIS BAYARD:
It's so frustrating that he's not around for us to shake him by the lapels and say what was going on there.

Bethanne Patrick:
And that really is the seed that started this whole play. The wanting to ask the questions. Wondering why he did it. What do you find most compelling about his story?

LOUIS BAYARD:
Obviously every writer brings some element of his life into fiction. I think what Hache did was he brought the fiction then back into his own life and it became a cross fertilization process, an endless loop of fictionalizing that, uh, showed no signs of ending and. Most of the writers I know are pretty sensible folks. We know where to draw the line, you know, uh, we may still make things up, but so did George Santos. I don't think it's endemic to being a writer. If anything else, you are clearer, I think, in some cases about where that line is and where you've crossed it. I will use people for my own life, but as soon as I get them on the page, they're already being transformed simply by being put in the act of fiction. But then, I don't go back into the world and think of those people as real life people in terms of what I just converted them to.

Bethanne Patrick:
The notion that Carrillo believed his own lies so much that they became the fabric of his reality does raise questions about his morals, and his mental health. But as someone who copes with mental illness, I have to admit that his masking, in a way, makes sense to me because it’s something I myself did for years. I tried to convince everyone around me that I easily coped with my responsibilities, even while it was difficult to do anything. 

It’s a different story with Hache Carrillo because of the cultural and racial elements, but I have to imagine we all sort of build ourselves into a heightened version of ourselves, albeit to a lesser degree than Carrillo. And if the performance of that better version winds up paving the way for other writers from marginalized backgrounds and is rooted in something honest, like Carrillo’s struggle with his racial identity or his felt sense of inadequacy…I do wonder if perhaps the criticisms came too quick too fast. Here was a man trying to play himself out of how small he felt.

We were trying to put a label on someone who contains both the performance and the performer. We were trying to put a label on someone who poignantly understood that truly good fiction comes from some place real.

The last line in Carrillo’s novel, “Loosing My Espanish” may be a confessional of its own.

It reads as follows, “Pero that’s the funny thing about time and saying something, seňores, because the exact moment I said it was the same moment that it began to be untrue.”

Until you give voice to a lie, it’s not a lie. Until you choose to change your identity, you’re not a liar. 

Hache Carrillo lived during a time when his factual identity seemed difficult to him – especially his identity as a gay man. To him, living a lie felt easier than living his truth. 

Things have changed in the decades since Hache Carrillo changed his identity. 

Have they changed enough? No.

But perhaps they have changed just enough that another young man from Detroit, grappling with racism and homophobia, might choose to write about those struggles – instead of creating a new identity out of whole cloth.

We’ll never know if Hache Carrillo regretted the lies he told and the choices he made. 

But we also know that his choices resulted in a very fine novel and some years of excellent teaching, as well as colleagues who held him in high esteem. 

Just as Carrillo did in his fiction, and as all fiction writers do in their work, we can imagine a different ending for a person whose storytelling abilities took over his entire life. 

Rest in peace, Herman Glenn Carroll.

Rest in peace, Hache G. Carrillo. 

This is the final episode of season two of Missing Pages. Thank you for listening and sharing and being a part of these stories. We’ll see you all again sometime soon, keep an eye out on this feed.

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, Produced, mixed, and mastered by Chris Boniello with additional production and editing by Katelyn Bogucki.
This episode was produced by Claire McInerny.
This episode was written by Lauren Delisle.
Fact checking by Douglas Weissman.
Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Madison Richards, Morgan Swift, Vannessa Ullman, and Annabella Pena. 
Art by Tom Grillo. 
Produced and Hosted by me, Bethanne Patrick. 
Original music composed and performed by Hashem Assadullahi, additional music provided by Epidemic Sound. 
Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate.
Special thanks to Dan Christo, Matt Keeley, Lisa Page and Louis Bayard.

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