Who has a life worth telling? The answer to this question has changed throughout the history of literature. A minimum answer that could satisfy anyone would be: the one who tells it well.
The life of Cookie Mueller, for example, actress linked to the counterculture, member of John Waters’ troupe, memorable model for the photographer Nan Goldin, one of the many brilliant moths that moved around New York in the seventies and who went out too soon due to AIDS, he could easily fit into that category. However, if she were not a natural memoirist, what she tells would only be of interest to a few, to those people still obsessed with conveniently mythologized foreign underground scenes. Thanks to the efforts of friends and editors who collected her scattered texts – it does not seem that Mueller ever considered herself a writer, just someone who occasionally signed pieces for money, for example, advice columns in alternative magazines – it can now be read, also in Spanish, translated by Rodrigo Olavarría, almost everything he wrote in Walking through crystalline waters in a pool painted black (Los Tres Editores).
How about a horse trainer and stable girl from Iowa? Is her life worth telling? Writer Kathryn Scanlan understood that she did. And in Agafar les regnes (translation by Adriadna Pous, La Segona Perifèria) she does the exercise of narrating, in a first person interposed and with epigraphs of between two lines and a page and a half, the life of a woman named Sonia, who works in the horse racing circuit and, for a time, as a prison guard. In that common biography, as in all, there is room for uprooting, violence and tenderness. The book, which has won several important awards, such as the substantial Windham-Campbell, has become, also in the Catalan language, an organic word-of-mouth success.
Fiction, non-fiction, and the very fertile border territory that exists between the two never cease to provide new and stimulating answers to that question, that of how to tell one’s own life and that of others. Dorothy Gallagher (New York, 1935) breaks it down in the form of almost essayistic stories in Strangers in the House (Infinite Doll), the second of her memoirs, after How I Received My Inheritance, in which she recounted her childhood as the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants and communists, a field also worked by authors such as Vivian Gornick. Gallagher is one of those writers that other writers, like James Salter or Alice Munro, really like, who can see what is complex in what seems simple.
Sometimes, a life story is imposed in such a way that there is no choice but to tell it. This could have happened to María Larrea, a French filmmaker who discovered at the age of twenty-seven, via tarot cards, that her father was not who she believed, and undertook an investigation until she found the truth of his origin as a purchased baby, who was not stolen, already in democracy. Her undeniably biographical novel, Those of Bilbao are born where they want (Alianza), would not have the enormous interest it has, despite that irresistible story, if Larrea had not brought out a particular, sardonic and attractive literary voice.
The Mexican Aura García-Junco could legitimately ask herself who I am to tell the life of my father, who we were. A hyperactive writer and editor, practitioner of fantasy and all non-commercial genres, García-Junco’s father had two names, the one he put on his documents and the one he used to sign his texts and projects, H .Pascal. When he died, abruptly, although after a few years of physical and vital wear and tear, in 2019, his writer daughter received as an inheritance ten thousand chaotic books that smelled of tobacco and a lot of questions that she could no longer answer. do to her father. Pulling out those books, which live on red shelves that were also inherited, García-Junco composes an elegy, a profile of love and frustration, not without reproaches, of an ordinary man who wanted to be eccentric. The fantastic title is borrowed from James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan: God Strike Whoever Writes About Me (Sixth Floor).
“This is a book about the desire to write your own life, preferably in good company,” said Selby Lynn Schwartz, author of a strange and captivating hybrid novel, After Sappho (Alliance, translated by Aurora Luque), which mixes fabulation and historical story, with figures of the queer aristocracy such as Gertrude Stein, Colette or Vita Sackville-West.
Finally, two pure fictions only due to the apparent absence of biographical material, but not at all orthodox in their form: Story of a Terrace (Alpha Decay), a real estate fantasy that Hillary Leichter, the author of the interesting Something Temporary, writes in the form of interconnected stories; and If This Is Not My Home, I Don’t Have a Home (Seix Barral), the title with which one of the masters of the story, the influential Lorrie Moore (without her own, the style of many contemporary authors cannot be understood) returns to engage in the novel riding between the present and the past, with an episode located in the 19th century. Finn, the titular protagonist, is a middle-aged professor with a dull life. That is, worthy of being told.
