Contrariwise, recently deceased Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes defends McOndo literature for its capturing the contemporary Latin America of "today" rather than yesterday; and that despite such narrative technique, the McOndos have not forgotten the past literature. In "Empire of Dreams" (1988), by Giannina Braschi, the novella "The Intimate Diary of Solitude" presents a lonely heroine, a department-store make-up artist, who shoots the narrator of the Latin American Boom — because she despises the commercialization of her solitude. The Chilean novel, "The Movies of My Life" (2003), by Aberto Fuguet, depicts a grim boarding school metaphor of Pinochet's Chile — a disappeared pro-Salvador Allende cousin and a mean grandmother (in the style of Madame Defarge, "A Tale of Two Cities", 1859), capture the societal terror of the military government régime of General Augusto Pinochet. University of Los Angeles Prof. Verónica Cortínez, said that McOndo is about free thematic exploration and stylistic expression: "The McOndo writers reject the idea that Latin American writers need to ascribe to certain topics, or ways of being."