Valenzuela's mother was a powerful influence since childhood and provided her with the intellectual background and incentive for reading and writing. As a young girl, Valenzuela was an omnivorous reader of Jack London, Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, and William Faulkner, among others, whose works she first read in translation. Of the Latin-American writers, Borges and Cortázar, both of whom she knew personally, are among the most evident influences in Valenzuela's early fiction. Cortázar and Fuentes praised her work. In the United States it was Susan Sontag who first discovered her.
At age twenty Valenzuela married a French sailor and went to Paris. (She has one daughter from this marriage, Analisa, a painter living in Argentina.) While in Paris, Valenzuela observed the young prostitutes of the Bois de Boulogne and developed an interest in this human type, as attested by her first novel, Hay que sonreír (1966; translated as Clara, 1976), which she wrote when she was only twenty-one. Hay que sonreír tells of the misfortunes of Clara, a young, simpleminded prostitute who is seeking her identity and longing to use her mind instead of her body.
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