“The book is as if it had exploded, I am very surprised,” she says about Diary of a move (Alfaguara, 2024) Inés Garlandits author, on a sunny day that anticipates spring and that, she says, gives her joy. In the text, a woman who crosses the menopause symptoms talks about a real change but also other metaphorical ones: of sensations, from one body to anotherfrom a way of linking with men to another different way.
“The only thing that interests me is knowing what reaches readers, talking, touching the person on the other side,” says the writer and translator. “When I realize that that happened it’s great. It gives me great emotion, it gives meaning to everything. The book is very personal, I wrote it for five or more years“The truth is that I had a lot of doubts at some point because it is very fragmentary.”
When her text was already advanced, Alejandra Zina contacted her, who was going to dedicate the first issue of the digital magazine The short form to menopause, just the topic she had been writing aboutto ask for a text about that.
“I was surprised by how synchronized the request was with what was happening to me, with what I was writing at that time,” says Garland, adding that, although he sent a fragment, his writing project was somewhat on hold, and I wasn’t very convinced to continue moving forward.
However, just as it happens now with the book, the text exploded. “I say it all the time because it is as if it had been a volcano that was dormant and suddenly everything came out. It seems that it was a topic that really needed to be talked about,” he considers.
And he adds that the feedback from the readers, but also from the readers, of different ages, is “very enthusiastic.” A large number of women who go through circumstances similar to those of the narrator saw themselves reflected in the way of approaching menopause, but they also show interest in the book “other younger people who needed to hear something like that, or who are interested in how she looks back on her life and remembers different circumstances she went through, allowing herself to laugh at her own setbacks” , says.
–Is it a topic that is not talked about?
–It seems that it was very necessary and it was very quiet. For me it broke out when I had to experience a set of dissociated symptoms. He had a diary, a notebook in which he wrote things down. Then came the publication of the text in the digital magazine and then, as always happens to me, things started to appear like magic: other people talking about these same topics, or aging in general. There I also began to talk with other writers, which is my way of saying that I read and feel that I respond to them. My book, in turn, is an invitation to talk about topics that we cannot always talk about.. While all this was coming together I began to whitewash: I sent an email to around seventy women asking them to tell me about their menopause issues and five responded. At the same time, I have been consulting different doctors with different symptoms and none of them have told me ‘This is happening to you because you are menopausal and estrogen levels drop, which produces all these things.’
–Does the narrator intend to draw a kind of veil over this topic that, in the 21st century and with feminism on the rise, still seems to be taboo?
–I think it is a book of questions, not answers. But she asks the questions and it has to do with my questions, of course, and with questions that other women ask, too. About what the meaning of life is, where we are going, what we do. There are women – at some point he says it – who have had an apparently quiet life, married, with children, busy with that. Also, of course, there are other women with much more difficult lives; I’m not going to talk about that because it’s very obvious. If you have to go to a factory or a production line every day for whatever, you are not there to ask yourself so many questions, because it is very difficult. But with a minimum of privileges, so to speak, the questions that appear have to do with this.
The questions
Garland says that he wanted to write about everything that began to happen to him at this stage, “with all those horrible fantasies about old agedays in which life really ended, although then I was resurrected the next day, luckily.”
Clarify that it is not depressivealthough he states: “When I get down, I really get down. Luckily it doesn’t last long, but every time it happens I think I’m never going to come back again. I already know that I don’t have to listen to that voice so much, because also I’m exaggeratedand when I’m good I’m very good.”
That voice to which she decides not to pay so much attention, sometimes suggests to her that nothing will ever happen to her that will excite her. And that, she says, is “a huge lie.”
“What happens is that I changed my enthusiasm. They told me that the excitement had to be meeting men. And now I discovered that it is not. That is not my main enthusiasm, but writing, translation, friends, releasing a book and having people tell me what happened to them when they read it. Just as it is to talk, see the sky, the sunny days now that spring begins and in my neighborhood there is the smell of orange blossoms and jasmine. All of that is still there, and it is not linked to whether a man looks at me or not,” he considers.
The text
“For many years after the divorce, I would go out at night and think that maybe I would meet someone. (…) There was the possibility of not returning home. I don’t know why I thought that, I almost never stayed the night at the house of someone I had just met. In the time before menopause I stopped feeling that promise when I was going to come out. I knew I was going to come home. It was as if I had retired, nothing related to falling in love or desire would ever happen to me again in my life,” he says in one of the initial texts of the book.
And he continues: “The romantic dream was suddenly resurrected, as if it had been slowly riding a roller coaster cart. and up there, about to fall off the cliff, appeared, with no object of love in sight, the desire for romance, more clinging than ever. I was getting ready to go out and I was like, ‘someone might like it.'” “It was a fragile illusion.”
–What was it like writing in the first person from a narrator so close to these experiences you went through?
–In my environment there was a bit of modesty. To say ‘Oh, it was very strong for me.’ I suppose it is because they will be seeing what has happened to me and what has not happened to me, but that does not interest me. I write and let the reader think what they want. My family obviously does care, My mother called me specifically to ask me what of all that had happened to me and what hadn’t. I pulled her out, I told her ‘I’m not going to get into that conversation.’ I would have to start explaining how something I write takes flight and asks for things that were not factual and I don’t care about that. Stories ask, they have their own hunger. And I surrender to that need of history. I didn’t give the protagonist another name but it’s not a memoir either.. It was always called Diary of a movebecause it is a change of a way of thinking, of a house, of a body; lose a skin, like snakes.
Influences
“A book that helped me refine and organize myself was the essay The situation and the story, by Vivian Gornickwhich I think is spectacular and made me think about where I was telling all this from,” says Garland. “There is a cut, a look, although it seems as if it jumps from one thing to another, there is a common thread. It’s that look.”
She also mentions as references when writing this book “all the women” for whom she translated. in recent years, among them Sharon Olds or Bette Howland, “who wrote a memoir of her hospitalization after a suicide attempt and begins in a psychiatric ward, where she is recovering. “You have to be able to put light on that darkness,” says the writer, and she says that some of those translations helped her let go of the fear of getting angry.
“Anger is pure life,” he considers. “If we are not so afraid of it, it is a fire that starts and then goes out, it is reduced. It does not burn forests and cities. But it is repressed, yes, when it comes out it is a disaster. The path is to be able to share emotions, to be able to speak. Emotions that are not spoken become diseases, we are a very sick society. Especially women. I say physically sick, because of all the emotions we have to repress.”
What emotions are talked about in Diary of a move? “I talk about desire,” Garland says. “To totally release the desire, how nice it would be. Let’s go for it; we would be fuller. With all that that implies, with the complexity of plenitude. That is true eternal youth: that we do not lose the desire to be alive and the desire to be with others, or alone; whatever but good, in the sense of having peace and being enthusiastic, not blind to the beauty of life.”
Inés Garland basic
- She is a writer, translator and coordinator of narrative workshops. His works for adults, young people and children have been translated into several languages and his stories are part of anthologies in different languages.
- She is the author of story books The architecture of the ocean y With the sword of my mouthand the novels The king of the centaurs, A perfect queen y A truer life.
- He also published novels for young people Rock, paper, scissors (winner of the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis award), Usage (winner of the Ala Delta and Strega Ragazze e Ragazzi awards) and From the mouth of a lion (Alandar award).
- In 2018 he obtained the Looren scholarship for translators. Among others, she translated Tiffany Atkinson, Sharon Olds, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, Mavis Gallant, Jamaica Kincaid, Julie Hayden and Bette Howland.
- His books are read in schools in Spain, Argentina and Latin America.
Diary of a moveby Inés Garland (Alfaguara)