Follow our channel on WhatsApp and don’t miss SÁBADO’s great stories.
follow
Leave a body or live inside it? In Maus Hábitos, Alana S. Portero invites us to feel these questions from a girl trapped in a body that is not hers. A great debut in the novel, which did not escape the praise of Pedro Almodóvar.
Alana S. Portero: “I had to be happy and live, not succumb to fear”
Alana S. Portero’s debut novel isn’t afraid to be dirty, violent, aggressive. Her experience in theater (she is a director and co-founder of the theater company STRIGA) gave her the skills to know how to build and write characters. We are enveloped by them in Bad habits, through the eyes of a teenager in the body of a boy and her life in the San Blas neighborhood, in Madrid. As the author tells us, it is not autofiction, but there is a lot of it in this debut, whether because of her experience (the author is a trans woman) or because of her experience, even that which she cannot experience and which she can imagine (living) in the body of the protagonist of the book that was in the top 2023 of El País and, recently, Best Spanish Novel for Vanity Fair. We spoke to the writer via Zoom.
