Family time with Gabriela Wiener
Intimate chronicle of a motherhood without a filter.
Some time ago, a report on breastfeeding was published in Marie Claire magazine, which inaugurated a sudden interest in the subject in the media, some with a more fortunate approach than others. The author of this frank and straightforward article was Gabriela Wienerwho today introduces us to his family.
She arrived in Barcelona from her native Peru in 2003 and here she had, together with her husband Jaime Rodríguez Z.also a writer, to his daughter Lena. In 2008 he published Sexographiesand in 2009 Nine Moons. Considered a gonzo journalist, a term that describes the chronicler who is at the same time the protagonist of his chronicle and made famous by Hunter S. Thompson, her novels have that direct and crude style that characterises this journalistic genre.
In her case, the themes of the novels have been sex and pregnancy respectively. In Nine Moons, Gabriela is in hospital, recovering from surgery, when she learns that her father has been diagnosed with colon cancer, that one of her friends has just committed suicide and that the magazine she works for has closed down for good. Devastated and plunged into uncertainty, the future presents itself to her in the form of two unwelcome red lines in the Predictor, revealing that the nausea she is experiencing is in fact an unexpected pregnancy. Those nine months of waiting will be used to discuss the neurotic need to perpetuate the species while she imagines births without anaesthesia and has biotechnological delusions.
An epilogue could be added to this book and it would be called Lena. Lively and happy, her mother says of her "I love her. And she loves me. I love that it is a love that is precisely reciprocated. There are few in life. I love to come back from the world and she is there where I left her, waiting for me, seducing me, surprising me, manipulating me, I love to be her giant doll and her heroine. To have her sniff me and follow me around like a puppy dog, to crawl into my bed and imitate my horrible pouring, sure that I am the height of the cool. I love making her happy and that it is not an easy love, but an extreme, contradictory one, like all the loves in my life that are worthwhile and that make me live and write. I love being a mother because even if the hangovers are more physically painful, since she exists I have never again felt too stupid, too useless or too sad. My daughter is bright, beautiful and happy".
As for her work, "I will have to be consistent and let myself be surprised by my daughter, as I have surprised my mother. I suspect my daughter will be as smart as my mum about this sort of thing. I'd like her to ask me when the second part is due, and to give me some thoughtful, critical and humorous comments on my literary style. Oh, and of course, not to worry whether I leave it good or bad."
She says that the reality of her pregnancy "was objectively hard but it wasn't all the fault of hormonal changes, it was more to do with things that were happening to me: unemployment, loneliness, my father's illness, losses. A pregnancy lasts nine months, nine long months in which one goes through different moods, rejection and fear. That's why in my book there are tender images but also very dark and even gores; there is a lot of talk about life but also about death, about sex during pregnancy but also about porn with pregnant women, about the desire to be a mother and the hatred of mothers, about patricide and the horror of hospitals".
A typical Sunday morning?
Being in pyjamas, eating a dirty breakfast, watching movies with Lena.
Favourite place to go for a walk?
Our neighbourhood, the Raval.
Favourite reading?
Where the monsters live.
Favourite music?
La flor de la canela, by Chabuca Granda.
Favourite restaurant?
The Carmelitas.
Best advice you've ever been given about children?
That the cradle was not going to do me any good.
Moment you particularly remember?
There are so many. Recently, the day he read his first word.
