Ariana Harwicz: “All my stories stem from self-loathing”

How will they do the fictions of pedophile girl killers with the voices of cruel mothers, with this violence released from their reins? His first three novels, ‘Kill Yourself, Love’ (2012), ‘La Weak Mental’ (2014) and ‘Precoz’ (2015), have already been published by Anagrama, now collected in one volume under the ‘Passion Trilogy’. Dust rose for what in Argentina wild and instinctive from family portraits. But all this was before MeToo, at a time that seems distant today, when the term ‘bad mother’ was irrevocably interpreted as a heresy.

Push the boundaries of what can be said in terms of political correctness. Harwicz had to see how Twitter blocked his account after the ‘Kill yourself love’ thread was accused of promoting suicide. This led to a playful play that led some readers to rename the novel online ‘Go to the parrot shell, my love’. Argentine theaters are drawing draws today. Her three novels were staged in Buenos Aires and she will have the chance to watch her monologue ‘La weak mental’ at Casa América on the 12th at 19:30 in Barcelona. It will also be featured at KM América, the new Latin American Literature festival to be held at the García Márquez Library in Barcelona. His fame, translated into 18 languages, reached the United States, where they bought the rights to these works to take to the movies. The author, who should oppose the ‘mainstream’ of the time, emphasizes that these will be movies, not TV series.

It bears the medal-like ignorance of some readers, those who confuse fiction with fact: “I have found myself in incredible situations, especially in France, where I have lived for 15 years. year. , and where there is a lot of text against traditional motherhood today. In an article in ‘Le Monde’ they claimed that I was a bad mother. [Harwicz tiene un hijo de siete años] because I write about bad mothers and a French judge used the same argument during a trial. I like my books to be uncomfortable, which is the guarantee that they are not integrated into the system. And when Harwicz in the French press said she would rather have a dog than her son, she began to equate him with Brigitte Bardot, who loves animals more than people. Although the latter painfully explains it. “It hurts me because deep down all my stories stem from self-loathing and I pass that feeling on to the narrator.” He quotes Pessoa: “I am nothing / I will never be anything / I cannot want to be anything”.

native hell

When the author started, what would happen at the end? trilogy about domestic hells and mothers who see their relationship with their children broken very unconsciously, he performed some kind of exorcism. She was not yet a mother. “As I was writing, I felt that everything I imagined scared me. It was very disturbing for me. But he also told me: I’m not doing this, I’m just writing. So I was transferring my fears to paper.”

In 2012, she felt alone in her worries. “There is now a whole stream of thought in which these emotions are expressed and regulated. It can be said that it is no longer necessary to live motherhood in an ideal way. Shortly after 2012, both fiction and essay books began appearing in bookstores, and I felt that I was accompanied. But my original intention was to It wasn’t about discussing motherhood issues at all.” From this discussion, from any discussion, no truly literary work can emerge, he says: “Literature escapes categories. If I were to bow to them, I would be writing a novel about stance, and stance is very close to dishonesty. In any case, I firmly believe that a novel does not speak of what is shown, but rather something much more subtle, which is hidden.