The drafts of A Fish in the Water (El pez en el agua) in the Mario Vargas Llosa Papers at Princeton University Library bear witness to a creative, literary process in the work of autobiography: organising a life into language and genre. The preliminary drafts catalogued as ‘First Draft Version A’ and ‘First Draft Version B’ (over 200 pages each) closely follow Vargas Llosa's run for the Peruvian presidency, which he lost to Alberto Fujimori in 1990. Between his ‘Second Draft’, with the indication that it was completed in November 1991, during his residency at an institute for advanced studies in Berlin, and the completed book, with the indication that it was completed at Princeton in February 1993, he had composed at least four other drafts. The final version alternates between two kinds of chapters. The even chapters, closely related to the content of original drafts, amount to a political memoir of his failed political campaign. The odd chapters are a coming-of-age autobiography that chronicles Vargas Llosa's formative years, while the political chapters shed light on the private story of an individual who became a political figure. The coming-of-age narrative evokes aspects of the Bildungsroman. The pattern of alternating chapters resembles Vargas Llosa's most recurrent literary technique from Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (La tía Julia y el escribidor, 1977) until The Dream of the Celt (El sueño del celta, 2010), in which he alternates narratives that correspond to different periods in the lives of his characters, or to different literary registers. In short, there was a considerable amount of literary thinking brought to bear in the gestation of this book.