Hostesses Chronicles of Madrid's high society: the hostess girl, the lesbian countess, the duchess with the "thin mustache"...
Stories Toñi Moreno gives voice to the "cold and calculating" Dolores Vázquez
The poet Sara Torres (31) has broken into prose with
Lo que hay
(Reservoir Books), a novel that took just three weeks from its launch in May to announce the second edition.
It has already been written about the book that it is the debut of the year.
The key to her success lies in the way in which Sara deals with the premature death of her mother, the mourning that the narrator is going through, and also the relationships of love and desire that she builds with other women.
Her writing in verse was already awarded the Gloria Fuertes National Poetry Prize in 2014
and her studies explore lesbian narrative
and writing linked to cancer diagnoses.
He was born in Gijón and lived in London, Barcelona... He is now in Germany, where he is doing postdoctoral research thanks to a scholarship.
"What there is comes from an Asturian expression that says 'ye lo que hay'.
When my mother said it, it had to do with: this is what we have. Let's do what we can. It seemed important to me to title the book that way because in a context of mourning the body forgets what it has in front of it to be connected to what is lost, so
What there
is is to return to what is available in order to continue living", explains the writer to LOC.
When Sara's mother died, she was making love to a woman in Barcelona.
The book also travels between the forms of love and desire, guilt, fear and the option of choosing to live despite everything.
"Guilt serves to diminish your powers and is a form of control. In love, guilt plays a very important role because it is going through what we have or do not have the right to live all the time. The narrator is feeling guilty throughout the novel but he does not stop living despite it.
There are times when we have no choice but to live with negative emotions such as fear or guilt.
But the important thing is that we live despite it, that we continue to wish, to love...".
And he adds: "The healing role of sexuality is there and it is a source that we have available to take care of ourselves.
Sexuality is a very powerful space of health and joy
that is sometimes one of the few things that can counteract other negatives. Falling in love we also see it as the only state that takes us out of miseries".
Another image of the author with her dog Alba Ricart
Sara received her doctorate from Queen Mary University of London with a thesis entitled
The Lesbian Text.
Fantasy, fetish and queer becomings.
She considers it important that topics about lesbian relationships are written by bodies that experience them.
"It would be very sad that at the moment in which doctoral theses
on lesbian sexualities begin to be awarded scholarships, it would be cis men who wrote them"
.
The protagonist of
Lo que hay
lives with her partner in London while in Barcelona she maintains another relationship with a girl.
In the book, therefore, there is also talk of a kind of coming out of the closet of monogamy.
"I believe that within the discourse of opening up to sexual diversity that may be happening now, it is more comfortable for people to include a minority within the norm if that minority adapts to heterosexual normative parameters.
But minorities have developed subcultures , one of them that of affection.
We are not just talking about being allowed to have a homosexual partner. For me it is almost more important to revolutionize heterosexual culture than what body you sleep with. "
Asked if it is more difficult for a girl to come out of the closet than for a boy, she explains:
"A subject who announces herself as a lesbian is a failure.
Being a woman and a lesbian sounds like double precariousness. Also that a woman declares herself desiring is scandalous".
View this post on Instagram
Her novel is causing a
boom
similar to the one Lucía Etxebarria experienced with
Beatriz and the heavenly bodies in her day.
"I used to go to the flea market a lot on Sundays for books and flipped through the covers innocently and
looking for signs, as if they had to talk to me.
I must have found this one when I was 17 or 18 years old. We were used to friendship between women but it was not resolved and this book I remember that I did discover other horizons".
As for the authors who are references for Sara, the writer highlights Esther Tusquets.
"The books of the
Trilogy of the sea
and especially the first,
The same sea of all summers
. Esther is taking you
a story of desire between two women in a heterosexual system
and in a post-Franco bourgeois society in Catalonia. It is lesbian content of sad resolution but there is a lot of power".
In relation to feminism and the dissensions that exist within it, Sara quickly settles the issue:
"I'm not interested in the struggles between feminisms at all.
When I discovered it, it was all love, so it can't be turned into something else."
Conforms to The Trust Project criteria
Know more
Gay pride