In "Historia secreta de una novela, Vargas Llosa reveals everything that a good reader always wants to know about the authors that he or she most admires: how a literary work is born, how personal experience turns into verbal history, how somebody becomes a writer. We learn throughout these pages that writing is a sort of « inverted strip-tease, in which the revealed charms are none other than the nostalgia, guilt and spitefulness that the author carries along. This is the unforgettable tale of how every true narrator mixes, in adequate doses, fiction, reality, autobiography, and auto-invention in order to achieve one of those mythical places in the collective imagination.