The protagonist of ‘A note of fire and nothing more’, a debut novel by the Mexican Elena Piedra, plans a fire in Mexico City to erase everything, to the sadness inherited by her mother, her aunts and her grandmother, because “the fire is the possibility of starting from scratch, of breaking with what we do not like of ourselves,” explains the author.
The fire that lives in Fernanda’s mind, the main voice, is not seen as “a homicide,” argues the 35 -year -old writer.
It is rather “an act of release” to the question: “What happens when one day you wake up and realize that everything they told you is not so and you have to break with it?”
And it is that the stories that live in the memory of our families “give meaning to our identity and are very heavy, in addition, they are much more solid than we think, then breaking with them is very painful.”
It is “heartbreaking” to release that story, but sometimes it is necessary because “I cannot tell you that depression is inherited, but the idea of unhappiness,” he confesses.
Therefore, “for me it was important to give voice to conflicts and the feelings that many people seek to hide because they feel they are wrong. It is liberating to deal with this issue and write a family like mine, which is not perfect,” says the writer about this text that took her a year to write.
Problematize the “maternal” ideal
The family of ‘a note of fire and nothing more’ is also far from perfection, it is a nest of memories where women of different generations inhabit those who “society have also imposed not so healthy links.”
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Those links, such as maternal, “are often idealized and that is why I was interested in problematizing those affections with Fernanda asking questions about whether her mother really wanted to occupy that maternal role or if she had the ability to do so.”
It is those questions and the impossibility of communicating with their mother, those who cultivate “despair” in the protagonist’s psyche, and, therefore, the letters that she finds to unite that maternal bond is found.
“It seems that the mother is on one way and the daughter in another, her paths are parallel even if they are together,” he reflects on a relationship that reminds him of the one with his own mother.
However, he clarifies that in the novel there are not “neither good nor villains, rather they are all causes and effects” of the society in which they live.
“In everyday life is the entire universe”
As Lucia Berlin did in the 90s, Elena Piedra is part of this literary movement where many Latin American authors use self -fiction to appropriate the “intimate space imposed on women.”
“Turning to intimate spaces imposed on women for so long is happening as a relief and claim,” he defends.
In addition, “for me in the most everyday and most personal you can find the entire universe and this novel is one of those exercises,” he emphasizes.
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Then, he affirms, self -fiction and fiction are ways of “seeking the truth and making sense of that abstract, opaque and caked reality”, so this work published by Tusquets is liberating and somewhat “optimistic.”
With EFE information
