The journalist Silvana Paternostro was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, the place where Gabriel García Márquez congregated with friends and fellow writers, several of whom became characters in his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

Paternostro had moved to the United States as a teenager before she grasped García Márquez’s towering importance for herself. Later, she would attend a three-day journalism workshop led by the author. In writing “Solitude & Company,” her oral history of the Nobel Prize winner’s life before and after he found fame, she learned that several people closest to the author (his friends called him Gabo) had essentially taken a vow of silence to protect his privacy, “as if you were in the mafia.” Below, Paternostro talks about finding plenty of other people who would talk, García Márquez’s superstitions and discipline, and more.

Read more: The News York Times