Laura Esquivel was born the third of four children of Julio Caesar Esquivel, a telegraph operator, and his wife Josephina, in 1951 in Mexico. In an interview with Molly O'Neill in the New York Times, Esquivel explains, "I grew up in a modern home, but my grandmother lived across the street in an old house that was built when churches were illegal in Mexico. She had a chapel in the home, right between the kitchen and dining room. The smell of nuts and chilies and garlic got all mixed up with the smells from the chapel, my grandmother's carnations, the liniments and healing herbs." In another Times interview, Esquivel told Marialisa Calta that her ideas for her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate, came out of her own experiences in the kitchen: "When I cook certain dishes, I smell my grandmother's kitchen, my grandmother's smells. I thought...