I stumbled across the book review by Rodrigo García in the Paris Review about his book: A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, where he writes of “the ailing health and eventual passing of his father, the writer Gabriel García Márquez.”
He would say, “I work with my memory. Memory is my tool and my raw material. I cannot work without it. Help me,” and then he would repeat it in one form or another multiple times an hour for half an afternoon. It was grueling. That eventually passed. He regained some tranquility and would sometimes say, “I’m losing my memory, but fortunately I forget that I’m losing it,” or “Everyone treats me like I’m a child. It’s good that I like it.”
the Paris Review
Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was an amazing achievement of world literature and for me, personally, it was my first exposure to magical realism.