Despite the title – which refers to diets – and the image on the cover – a round woman like a circle – Free gelatin (Planet) is much more than a novel about an overweight girl that she feels uncomfortable with her body. It’s about something else. Marina Abiusojournalist raised in graphics who also worked in radio and televisiongets into fiction for the first time and puts together a story that, entertaining and at the same time distressing, reflects on the strength that social mandates have for womenthe need to fit in although it is always impossible and how that leads to always feeling lacking.
The protagonist is called Laura, but the men call her Laurita, an affectionate way that infantilizes her and distances her from being an object of desire, something that she needs to embody. She is young, lives alone in a rented apartment in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Palermo, studies Communication at the University of Buenos Aires, works as a producer on the first morning of a radio station and, although she entered with a small accommodation, she carries out her task with responsibility and excellence. So he rises, he moves well, he is on the path to success. Same, youAll time is missing. From kilos to lose, boyfriend to show or love to receive.
Laura has friends, dear ones, a faithful group that sometimes gets tense. She measures them, she gets exasperated, she avoids, she doesn’t finish telling them everything, she competes. She likes a boy who gives her some flair, but at the same time she doesn’t. It is your object of desire, source of anguish and pleasure, eternal risk for which he puts his self-esteem, dignity, objectives at stake. She has a boyfriend who seems to be “perfect”, but she gets a little bored and, of course, he has his flaws too.
Free gelatin It is a first person with the pulse of a chronicle, satirical and moving, funny and tremendously dramatic. Exhaust. Makes you laugh. Overwhelms. At times it seems like Patrick Bateman’s furious enumeration of brands and consumption in American Psychothe 1991 novel by Bret Easton Ellis, but in the succession of meals: those that are allowed, those that are not, those that resist and those that win the fight. The objective, instead of more money and prestige on Wall Street, here is a number on the scale. The victims are, in both cases, women. Laura does not literally dismember them, but she does dissect and objectify them. The one she mistreats the most is herself.
As the protagonist achieves what she sets out to do, she encounters another obstacle. Her hit list is the serial killer stalking her. It never comes and that is the noise that the machinery in action makes, the bitter taste it leaves in the mouth. She diets because she doesn’t feel comfortable with her body. She lives obsessed with her size. You want to “take up less space,” “shrink.” He goes to the psychologist, but his most introspective relationship is with his nutritionists. It’s Laura when she loses weight, and Laurita if she gains. That diminutive is the only small thing that escapes him.
Although it does not go that far from self-reference – the geography is the newsrooms, but of a radio, and the protagonist is a producer of current affairs programs – The author focuses on a story where the counterfigure is “how to be” (mis)learned.: skinny, pretty, successful, young, with a boyfriend, with a university degree, elegant, with their own house, where everyone is a potential rival, more than anything the others, them. And Laura, or Laurita, does not meet each of the items. The tension of the story is in his impossible race.
Free gelatin it’s a rom-com. The love story at stake is with oneself. And it has, due to its agility, humor and characters, a pulse for a miniseries. “They tell me it, always as a compliment and that’s how I receive it. I would like to, with logical fear. I love Laura, I wouldn’t like her to end up being a caricature. But I think there is an audience for something like this, it would be interesting to see what happens by transferring it to another language,” the author reflects in dialogue with Clarín-Culture.
The book could be the first seasonwhich would be among the streaming platform options along with enviousthe Netflix super hit written by Carolina Aguirre starring Griselda Siciliani. Like all algorithm matches, it is worth clarifying that they are not similar at all. Free gelatin It has another plot, another type of protagonist, a different conflict. But they share in common the (good) incorrectness of showing a woman as the main character who is not naturally pretty and good.: she wants things that are not the best for herself and that, in that arc that she travels, allows a certain cruelty to emerge. With herself, but also with her environment and, most of all, with other women.
“I’ve been waiting for an invitation for a week and 15 kilos,” spits the protagonist, who also wishes: “I would love to fall in love with someone who hasn’t seen me before. That he thinks I’ve always been skinny, skinny without effort.” In Free gelatin There is no ideal male, a modern Prince Charming, a Mr. Darcy who rescues the protagonist from another and/or from herself. That’s a success. Because Laura, Laurita, is a character who runs on the margins of gender and body diversity discourses. It’s not because the story takes place in 2007, populated by BlackBerrys, Gmail chat, before Ni una menos and the fourth wave of feminism. This is a resource that helps show in a more direct way certain self-inflicted atrocities, but which do not stop happening. “As in diet, in love I never reach the maintenance stage,” he announces.
The author, who does have that awareness – until 2023 she was in charge of TN’s gender agenda – puts the reader in a distressing placeachieved with that unfiltered record of Laura, Laurita, that fits anyone. In Free GelatinAbuse appeals to the common feeling that something is always missing to reach the ideal. The novel is dedicated to “the inadequate ones”, a gesture related to the story, which points and hits the target if the reader is a woman or not, young or not, with a job or without, is in a process of broadening the gaze or He didn’t even start it. Or if you believe that you have already overcome so many mandates and then you discover the barrage of etcetera that are still present and that, in reality – and in these times – it is necessary to revisit.
Marina and Laurita
Among other successes in his career, Abiuso is co-author. Together with Soledad Vallejos, from Get startedthe biography of Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat. The journalists chose to open that book with an epigraph from the Argentine businesswoman that says: “Once I asked myself if all this made sense, if my mission in the world was nothing else. I thought very seriously about leaving everything and going to work with the poor in Africa. In the end I didn’t go because of the heat. I suffer a lot from the heat”. The epitome so brilliantly sets the tone of the investigation and the character narrated, that it went viral. Without the book. In itself.
Abuse, in fiction, maintains the record of its journalistic version: it is accurate and sharp. “I have no idea how many calories are in an apple and I’m not interested in learning. “Knowing those things is fat,” it begins, in Laura’s voice, who carries the story in 230 pages of twists and turns with different demands. The desperate thing, almost on the pulse of a thriller, is not the deprivation of food, but the secret. The protagonist says that she has problems with gluten, she eats in the bathroom, she asks for two spoons for a quarter of ice cream that she is going to consume alone. Will it reach less than 70 kilos? Will they discover her putting on her belly or eating her diet food?
Laura’s life is exhausting. Laurita is cruel. She calls those who have lost weight “fat people on pause,” and calculates on the subway and in other public places how many women are skinnier and fatter than her. “Fat women who eat in public never cease to impress me,” he says, and also shows: “When you say you’re on a diet, everyone becomes a prosecutor.” Behind that contempt there is fear. Strength is a facade of fragility. “With fat girls they get more excited and on top of that they expect you to be grateful,” he reflects.
The satire is stinging, scene after scene alternates humor and anguish. Abiuso focuses on a story that is about a contemporary malaise, which begins in the tension at the beginning of this century, when the story takes place, and explodes now, at the same time as its publication, a decade and a half later, when The existential vacuum is a global crisis and depression due to failure to meet capitalist demand is the new pandemic.
–When and how did it occur to you to write fiction?
–I was always interested. He is always “childish”, almost. But also from a very young age I started working as a journalist, I got hooked on narrative journalism and tried to train myself in that trend. I felt like it was filling me, let’s say. When I stopped writing as much as a journalist, I wanted to play a little with writing. Try a workshop, see if you still had that desire. First I worked on autofiction. When this idea appeared I realized that I wanted to work on it as fiction. I felt that this way it would be more true, let’s say.
–Where did this story come from?
–Inés Garland, who is my workshop teacher, suggests “writing about what is embarrassing.” I would never have spoken about this on my own behalf and at the same time it is a universe about which I know a lot. I could take things from me, from friends, from a friend, from my time in women’s magazines. I felt like the universe was there. What I was interested in showing was the obsession, the unhealthy internal dialogue. And I thought it was interesting that it was about something that was socially accepted: trying to lose weight.
–-How long did it take you?
–It was very fast. I think the idea started in 2022. And a huge urgency grabbed me. I had the character in my head and the conflict, but I didn’t know how it ended. I had to write it. So I was also in a hurry to move forward to see what would happen. I know I sound crazy, but I really needed to write it and feel what was real and what wasn’t, what things could happen to Laura and what she could do with it. I wrote a lot and then I started weeding. Work on the idea.
–Are you going to continue writing fiction?
-After Free gelatin I didn’t feel like going back to that material that was memory type. Maybe another time, I don’t know. Right now I’m not interested except what I was able to take from that story of mine for another fiction that I have in my head. So it seems that, for now, my interest is there.
–We are all “inadequate” ones, you say to open the book. Why do you think it is now necessary to dedicate a story like this?
–This novel is about weight, but it is much more about the mandate, about fitting in, about always feeling lacking and in competition. I’m sure you don’t need to have been on a diet, I’m not even saying you’re overweight, to recognize that feeling.. It’s a wink. I say we are all. And although male heads experience it differently, I should have said “everyone.” For example, and without spoiling it, several men have been disconcerted by the ending. And I find it very interesting that that happens.