It’s Tuesday, the last ten minutes of the night at a small writing school in Madrid. It was dark, and although this darkness is not the darkness of winter, it is also the darkness of spring. yeah I teach first grade which will last three months, tries to get to know the students a little. A series of people that I had forgotten about this term and who, after a while, when I met them on the street, asked me how I knew them for a while without realizing it.
Now that I’m sleeping, drinking water, quoting Flannery O’Connor playfully, and dressed like everyone else in the world, you’d imagine you’d see a lesbian creative writing teacher; Dressed as Eva Victor and the amazing one Sorry, honey; Dress up as Diane Keaton in every way Diane Keaton; dressed in a way that invites self-parody, caricature, easy chic: dress pants, loafers, white shirt, navy blue corset and cashmere navy chaleco, all a size larger than I fit, all bought second-hand, perhaps belonging to a deceased elderly person.
And ready, in response to no one asking me, one graduate says she only enjoys novels based on real life. Novels that tell things that happened “in truth”. And I try hard to avoid giving her a condescending look, loathing the discussion of a fictional story, the discussion of how an invention explains more reality than its own reality, and I ask her, “So what?”. I would like to know the truth. And she honestly and automatically says to me: “No, help me understand myself more”.
This is the same week as Leo Family assumption by Claire Lynchwhich comes out this month from Random House, and here is the perfect book to try to convince my graduate student who should try sharing with fictional stories. Set between 1982 and 2022, the novel jumps across generations with the same precision and subtlety as the brilliant Las horas by Michael Cunningham.
It tells the story of a young married couple from a British village of the same age it breaks when a woman falls in love with another womanand the emotional and judicial implications it brings. And he talks above all about the loss of custody of his wife Maggie, about the loss of total custody suffered by the vast majority of homosexual women in the divorce cases of the time, about the infamous harshness of Thatcher’s England, so sought after and ignored again and again.
Claire Lynch tells the story of a young British village marriage in the 1980s that falls apart when a woman falls in love with another woman.
But more than the obvious interest that a story can arouse in people who can relate to it, the best is how it is writtenthe way he builds deep characters, with smiles that fail and as the dedicator says, he does everything he can. Because that’s the maximum that can be done.
Acerta in siñalar, not to torpedo father or mother, until the system that was very unpleasant to life. Lynch, a doctor of literature at the University of Oxford, documents himself with the enthusiasm of academics and bebe the best English literary tradition To create a story that reminds us how important it is to be aware. “There will be so many people around your life that one day you will look at them and not recognize any of the people you are in,” we advised one person.
The following week, I walk into class, look up at my student, hand her the book, and in a way that she intends for me to be amused and amused, I tell her, “It’s not based on a true story, but it’s based on a lot of true stories.”
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