Julia Alvarez was born in 1950 in New York City. When she was three months old, her family moved back to the Dominican Republic, where they lived for the next ten years. She grew up with her extended family in sufficient comfort to enjoy the services of maids. Critic Silvio Sirias believes that Dominicans value a talent for story-telling; Alvarez developed this talent early and was "often called upon to entertain guests". In 1960, the family was forced to flee to the United States after her father participated in a failed plot to overthrow the island's military dictator, Rafael Trujillo, circumstances which would later be revisited in her writing: her novel "How the García Girls Lost Their Accents", for example, portrays a family that is forced to leave the Dominican Republic in similar circumstances, and in her poem, "Exile", she describes "the night we fled the country" and calls the experience a "loss much larger than I understood".