It has become customary that each new novel by Claudia Pineiro climb to the top of the bestseller ranking, a few days after arriving in bookstores. A success that is repeated with each title and was repeated this year with “The time of the flies”his latest book.
Although it can be read independently, her new story is a continuation of one of her first novels, “Yours”, an ironic and accurate thriller, in which a middle-class housewife, happy by dint of hiding cracks and imbalances; she discovers that her husband is cheating on her and, therefore, kills her lover.
“The Time of the Flies” happens fifteen years later, when Inés murders her; she is released after serving her sentence. Prison transformed her in many ways. In principle, a friend of hers, La Manca, brought her a different kind of family and a greater understanding of the idea of sorority. She also helped her to redesign her value scale, the place that men occupy, her passions and even her maternal feelings. With the same black humor as always, Inés is still a woman with imperfections, but much more complete and coherent than she was in the past.
One of the main merits of Claudia Piñeiro, as fiction writer, has been to naturally show in her texts, many of the issues for which she militates in real life: stop violence against women and achieve a fairer distribution of tasks and remuneration for them. And not only does he do it in her novels, but also in the scripts she writes for the movies and streaming, an activity that, at the pace of the interests of these times, his professional life becomes increasingly important, with hits like “The kingdom”, directed by Marcelo Piñeyro.
“They are gifts about the end of my career,” he explains to NEWS. I’m over 60 years old and I can’t imagine writing crazy series. I’ll keep writing novels if worthwhile ideas come to my mind. I am at an age where I have to be interested in what I do and I have to fall in love with a project”.
Above all things, Claudia Piñeiro feels like a tireless and always enthusiastic worker, a condition that has been key to making her one of the most successful writers in the country.
NEWS: Have you gotten used to the fact that your books spend weeks at the top of the best-seller ranking?
Claudia Pineiro: I don’t know if the word is “get used to”. If the last book did well, one wonders what will happen to the next. Because I get bored, each of my books is different from the previous one. So, I don’t know if the reader will like the next book. But I write what I feel like. I don’t think about satisfying people.
NEWS:“Thursday’s widows”his most famous book, is it still selling?
Piñeiro: All my books continue to be reprinted. Every year “Widows…” is read in a school or in a reading club. It is a book that keeps coming back.
NEWS: One of the topics discussed in the book is the desire to be a mother. Or rather, he didn’t want to.
Piñeiro: For some time now, many women have stopped having a problem saying they don’t want to be mothers. And those of us who are mothers can already confess the great difficulties we had in many aspects of motherhood. Sometimes, issues such as unpaid care are mixed with love within a capitalist system, which works because a lot of work is done by women for free. There are many things that are from “mother’s love”, which should also be from “father’s love”. In the case of Inés, during the novel “Yours”, she pretended that she was a wishful mother. While she pretended to be a “good mother” she was a disaster, because she didn’t give a damn about her daughter and she couldn’t have any bond. When she accepts that she did not want to be a mother in “The Time of the Flies”, that is when she can make a maternal bond with her daughter.
NEWS: You played a leading role in the fight for the sanction of the Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancy Law (ILE). Once the law is achieved, what task do you think is a priority from now on, for the militancy in favor of women?
Piñeiro: What do we have to do now for women? We have to clarify for which women, in which country, in which part of the world. There are women who have much worse situations than ours. It was very important to get the ILE law enacted, because from there other rights were established. But that does not mean that there are other issues, such as the free work of women in care tasks. This is important and it is a topic that is coming.
NEWS: Did your participation in these struggles have any negative consequences?
Piñeiro: I suppose there are people who don’t like the way I think and say: “I’d better read someone else.” This seems valid to me. What does not seem valid to me are the very violent attacks I received. The attacks that many women suffer through social networks are minimized. In my case, both for my fight in favor of legal, safe and free abortion and for having written the series “El reino”. This should not be justified or taken as normal. There are people who tell you not to give a ball. But that they send you videos where women are raped and tell you: “This is what is going to happen to you.” Or photos of green Falcon cars, with the message: “We are going to pick you up”, this leaves marks. I don’t change my way of thinking because of that, but I take care of myself more than what I say. Many times I am going to write something on Twitter and delete it, because I know that this is going to mean three days of people attacking me. And I don’t feel like it. As a writer, I don’t feel like I’ve lost readers over this. I am approached by many young people and men who knew me from the fight for legal abortion. They joined more than those who stopped reading me.
NEWS: What changes for the writer when do series?
Piñeiro: I feel more comfortable writing a novel. That is the sea where I like to swim. But the experience I had with “The Kingdom” was one of absolute freedom. I had a spectacular time. I learned a lot from Marcelo Piñeyro. We did not have any type of restriction from the streaming platform, Netflix. The second season we wrote last year. The first six months were recorded and these second six months post-production was done. Now it is in the hands of Netflix to decide in which month of next year, the premiere will be.
NEWS: Was being a public accountant useful in your life as a writer?
Piñeiro: It helped me a lot to go to the UBA. It is an excellent training place, regardless of the career you do. They taught me to study, to work, to investigate. The degree gave me the opportunity to have a good job and with that good job save money to write later. And I learned things that allow me to understand a contract very well. Many writer friends call me to find out what to do with their contracts.
NEWS: Do many people write to you asking you to read their books, to give them their opinion?
Piñeiro: Yes, a lot, but it’s impossible for me to satisfy them. People don’t have to know that you have a busy work schedule. I even have a hard time finding the time to read a friend’s novel.
NEWS: Why do so many people want to write?
Piñeiro: Guillermo Saccomanno, my teacher, used to say that he wanted people to come to his workshop who wanted to be writers. There are people who want to write, but do not want to be a writer. He wants to tell the story of his family, to vent. When he gave a writing workshop, people would call me and say: “My psychologist thinks that I should go to a writing workshop.” Perhaps it would do them good to write, but you don’t go to a workshop so that it will do you good from a psychoanalytic point of view. I always remember that at a book fair, a big man approached me and said: “I just bought your book, it’s the second book I’m going to read in my life.” And he added: “I have 6 novels written, how can I get them published?” This gentleman read only one book in his life and he has written six novels, which he believes are publishable. How can you believe that it is so easy to write literature, transfer what you write to a book and, later, have what you wrote read? In the way of writing there must be a lot of will and desire, because there is a lot of frustration.
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