Chilean novelists born during the 1970s who experienced as children the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet are reappraising how the dictatorship may have harmed its second-generation survivors. Initially most of these writers ignored politics, focusing instead on blighted intimate relationships, and those few who did explore the aftereffects of repression dealt with private mourning and intrapsychic distress. However, three important novels published in the last five years blame Chile’s apolitical, privatizing stance for helping undermine the human relationships of their authors’ generation. Av. 10 de julio Huamachuco (2007) by Nona Fernández, Estrellas muertas (2010) by Álvaro Bisama, and Formas de volver a casa (2011) by Alejandro Zambra contrast with two explicitly political novels written several years earlier by members of same generation: Andrea Jeftanovic’s Escenario de guerra (2000) and Nicolás Poblete’s Réplicas (2003). By tracing changes in a lexicon of tropes that all five writers share, I detect a shift from portraying psychic pain to reviving the political activism of Chile in the 1980s and acknowledging in the public sphere the dictatorship’s crimes.