Home is the most dangerous place for women

Philologist and former member of the Congress of Deputies for En Comú Podem, Mar García Puig (Barcelona, ​​​​1977) surprised a lot with his first book, The history of vertebrates –which received the Ciutat de Barcelona Award in the essay, humanities, and history categories–, where she openly poured out her experience on the little-explored alliance between motherhood and mental health. I was captivated by its stark sincerity and because it was filtered through the lens of her literary training, and the result was a very balanced combination of sanity and rapture, between stark experience and thoughtful awareness.

With This is so scary He has done it again: he has once again mixed his anguish and his love for books. García Puig is, above all, a wounded letter, and that is why he has named the book with a quote from The storm Shakespearean. In this case, the main theme is metaphor, or rather, the tendency we have to speak in metaphors: "We utter a metaphor at least every twenty-five words. That's about six metaphors per minute. In an hour of uninterrupted dialogue, that would be three hundred and sixty metaphors." And if we speak in metaphors, we live in metaphors. With metaphors, we substitute the real world for what we imagine. And perhaps more so than she, given her confessed need for love, which makes her seek him "sometimes crawling on the floor and other times with proud arrogance."

Metaphor, and by extension language as a constructor of realities, is here a sustained excuse that the author uses to tell us about her vital moment – a separated woman with two twin children – and her love for Gothic literature written by women, that literature of the disturbance of the 20th century “ghosts of Gothic writers of other centuries and our stories so often branded as egocentric reflect the same struggle to be authors and narrators of our lives and our deaths.” A very timely correspondence, due to the equivalences – not similarities – between the fears of some and others.

García Puig’s family always tells her that she resembles Aunt Alba, who is in the style of the protagonist ofThe yellow wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and because of her concerns, she saw things on the walls that weren't there. Gothic literature tells us about the home as the most dangerous place for women, and we know that gender violence abounds in domestic settings: "Everyone is capable of experiencing terror when what we know becomes a threat. But women have historically lived with it."

In This is so scary, a book that doesn't reach the power of the previous one, but that follows the same paths with great coherence, we travel with the author to the prefabricated world of Disneyland Paris, where she spends a few days with her children as if in a bubble with recurring visits to the haunted mansion. And we accompany her to the Buenos Aires Book Fair, where she goes for work and without offspring, and where what interests her most is the Recoleta Cemetery. As her luggage, quotes from Aristotle, Dickens, Virginie Despentes and, of course, Susan Sontag.