“On December 20, 2015 I became a mother and I went crazy & rdquor ;. That is the forceful and, in its own way, beautiful beginning of ‘The history of vertebrates’ (Random House Literature), a book in which mar garcia puig (Barcelona, 1977) draws from her own painful experience to give a voice to all the women who have seen and see how motherhood took away their sanity and still does. Philologist, editor and deputy of En Comú PodemGarcía Puig crosses personal narrative and historical essay in his first book to remember that “there is a long line of links between motherhood and madness& rdquor ;.
Why write this book so intimate and, at the same time, universal?
When the episode happened to me runaway anxiety, I began to dive into books and history to find company and community and take the blame off myself. I found a photo of a Victorian woman, admitted to a mental hospital, on which she put puerperal madness (postpartum madness). At that time, they took pictures of the crazy women. From there I began to investigate and, when I had a lot of documentation and had established links with some of these women, I felt obliged to give them a voice. In the book I talk about women who wrote about their experience, but also about anonymous women lost in an archive of history.
Did you know from the beginning that you were going to be part of the story?
No, the idea was to do a test. I clicked when I went to the Vall d’Hebron hospital to speak with the psychiatrist who treated me at the first moment, and she gave me my history. When reading it, it seemed pure literature to me. I was moved, and I felt that among the records of all those women I had to put mine. That’s where I start to tell my story.
Was it difficult for you to find the balance between the historical essay and the personal story?
Once my history came in, everything was very organic. In its own way, the story I tell is one of terror, of ghosts. And gothic literature, of which I am a great reader, gave me a hanger in the style that allowed me to string together all those crazy stories, which are very literary and very gothic, without leaving a more personal psychological piece and another more historical essay. . Maternal fear has shaped history and the position that women have in society, and Gothic literature allowed me to take this historical journey.
Did you hesitate a lot about how far you wanted to expose yourself?
At first I considered leaving out or masking some things, like the episode of the trichophagia [la ingesta del propio cabello]. And there was a point that I thought of when my children were older and read it. But I tried to set some limits for myself and it didn’t work out because the approach was to go with all the consequences. As it helped me in my process to read women who were capable of verbalizing all this, from the greatest humility I felt a kind of debt.
His book comes at a time when mental health is on the table.
One thing I wanted to do in this book was to take mental health out of the strictly medical realm. Sometimes we think that with therapy, which helped me a lot, we are going to solve things that are more than something medical. There is also a cultural, material, historical, philosophical component, a human part and certain limits. Mental health, madness, cannot be totally stopped and resolved, we also have to learn to live with it and accept that it is there. Sometimes it is simplified from too many sides and its complexity and incomprehensible condition are not assumed. Madness should not be glamorized because it implies a lot of suffering, but it must be claimed as part of life. And I think calling it insanity gives it back a little bit of that amount of dimensions.
Did you always know that you would include your experience in politics in the book?
I am not at all spiritual, I do not have magical thinking and I have always wanted to leave the irrational out of my life. But I became a deputy and gave birth on the same day. Although I think it’s coincidence, I was forced to talk about how intricate the two things are, and it is still a symbol that in my case they occurred on the same day. There is a public part in motherhood and madness, another of those things silenced between four walls, and there is an intimate irrational part in politics. I couldn’t stop linking them.
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He tells his story in a very physical way, with the body always in the foreground, as if he wanted to make it clear that the things he is talking about are real.
For many women, the body has been a space of pain. In my case, the corporality to which I had turned my back all my life exploded in my face with motherhood.