“When I feel like life is running over me, I tolerate it by writing,” confesses the writer and psychoanalyst Natalia Zito in his meeting with NEWS, through the Zoom platform. His back is guarded by a shelf full of books and on one side, on a wall, numerous circles ranging from light blue to black stand out. Perhaps these forms, having no beginning or end point, represent the unity, perfection and movement that have led her to continue, without stopping, the path of writing.
His first book of short stories “Water from the same pipe”, published in 2014; It was later adapted for the stage under the title “The Naked Moment.” The novel followed “Strange”in which, through the narrative resource of the interior monologue, written with sharp irony and relentless honesty, we discover what a woman feels while waiting for the moving truck that will take the objects from her home, after a separation after twelve years of coexistence.
He continued his work with fiction “Twenty Seven Nights”based on the events that occurred in the life of the plastic artist, millionaire and art patron Natalia Kohen when she was admitted by her daughters, against her will, in a psychiatric institution. Then she would come up with the essay “Traitors, writing fiction”, in which she addresses different problems and perspectives when it comes to telling stories with autobiographical material.
For these days he saw the light “You”, edited by Emecé. It is the continuation of a trilogy in which he is working and where he immerses himself in complex issues such as terminal illness, fatphobia, motherhood and intrafamily abuse.
With a frank look, protected by designer glasses, the author adjusts the waves of her blonde hair with one hand, and surrenders serene and relaxed to the interview.
NEWS: How did the writing of this new novel come about?
Natalia Zito: It arose from a personal situation. My dad had leukemia the same as the character of “You”. He was sick for two years and in the last few months, despite the fact that we had had the diagnosis for two years, when I realized that he was going to die, I felt the same thing that shot “Rara”: if I didn’t write, I wasn’t going to. tolerate. Those months I wrote a diary that later became this novel.
NEWS: Is it autobiographical?
Zito: I always appeal to the definition of a Mexican writer and psychoanalyst, Serge André, about a book by him, which is “one hundred percent autobiography plus nine hundred percent fiction.” When I got to work on the journal, once that stuff had cooled down a bit, I got very involved and started to think of it as pure fiction. There is a lot of autobiographical and also fiction.
NEWS: It caught my attention that in the novel there are words that are not mentioned. The characters do not pronounce “leukemia” or “cancer”. Why do you think a lot of people don’t either?
zito: I went through the experience that my dad said very clearly: “If I have cancer, I don’t want to know”. That made me wonder, why not? He was a smart man. I understood that he knew how to take care of words that he knew would hurt him very much. For me, who is a psychoanalyst, that matter was something that I asked myself a lot. Doctors often say that the patient has a right to know. It’s not about hiding. But sometimes patients know more than one supposes. I came to the thought, which I used for the novel, that one also has the right not to know. By not pronouncing words that, if they had, would have died before. It is the same logic to think about the future. Going through the end must be extremely difficult, especially for someone who wants to live. You cannot ask that person to simply accept “I am going to die”, like someone who says “well, next week I am going on a trip”. You can only move through if you continue to give yourself the chance to believe in the future, as we do every day. We believe in the future even though it is something we are not sure of. I found it in my dad, and in different novels, for example, in the biography of Clarice Lispector, where Olga Borrelli, her great friend and companion, tells that even when they were going to the hospital and she was clearly deteriorated, she made plans to travel and of things I would do. It was clearly the way to tolerate that. I realized that words can heal, but also hurt a lot.
NEWS: Are you still seeing patients?
Zito: Yes. One day I attend all day and the rest is pure literature. I give workshops, I write, I do everything that has to do with writing. It is a transformation that I have been doing for many years. I was purely a psychoanalyst, until at one point I realized that mine was something else. Now these two professions have coexisted for some time, in harmony. It is not that I am looking to stop attending, I do it much less; but yes, I continue.
NEWS: Is she methodical when writing? So many hours a day or does inspiration come at any time?
Zito: I have an extremely chaotic writing process. I’m not chaotic, but in that part of me, which I suppose is the real one, I write as if on impulse. I don’t spend a whole day writing maybe because I can’t. I have young children and there are many things to do to pay the bills. It’s quite chaotic, especially since the artistic process is somewhat erratic. I agree with the idea that writing is work, but it is tied to an artistic process linked to desire, and desire is deeply erratic. It is not something we master. The gate opens and closes without my control.
NEWS: Do you write at home or in coffee shops?
Zito: Not at home, it’s impossible with my children constantly asking me for things (laughs). If I think, many times I am with my head elsewhere. Since I have my burrow, my studio, I basically write here. In another time, when he rented an office only to attend patients, he wrote in the bars of Palermo, Núñez and Belgrano
NEWS: To what extent do you apply your knowledge of psychoanalysis to the construction of your characters?
Zito: Around my nineteen or twenty years, when I started reading Freud in college, psychoanalysis changed my way of existing, of thinking about life. Literature is no stranger to that, it is filtered by this matter. I guess I have a knowledge about a certain logic, let’s say. If, naturally, I can think that a character says a certain thing and if it is logical, or more or less logical, that he does a certain other thing. But at the time of writing I don’t think about it theoretically. I know that you write with the unconscious. I give myself to do it in a fairly free way.
NEWS: Don’t you have a pattern on how a character has to react?
Zito: Never. Yes, on the other hand, I think a lot about the characters and, since I have a slow writing process, I usually spend years with a novel on top of me. I am realizing things perhaps quite slowly. In that sense, it is similar to what happens with patients. You listen to someone and sometimes it takes time to get to a point.
NEWS: How do birth and death, the two central themes of your novel, affect you personally?
Zito: My personal experience makes me think of them as not opposites. Actually, they are part of the same thing. In pregnancy the possibility of death is so present in many ways. They are situations of great fragility and vulnerability of the body. In my novel, that coexistence between the father and the daughter interested me because the body is one of the obsessions of my writing, and both show great discomfort. Something that grows inside you and you do not control, goes beyond one. I thought about it more out there than for making two opposites coexist. In fact, the protagonist at first doesn’t know if she wants to have it or not. She feels that maybe if she doesn’t worry she’ll get over it. It has to do with my way of thinking about pregnancy and, surely, with my own history.
NEWS: She is describing what happens to her body and memories of when she was bullied at school due to fatphobia appear…
zito: The body, for me, is like the obligation to live with something we did not choose. That surely it is not the way we want and, over the years, moreover, it becomes less and less the way one wants. Those two things are there together; the father who tolerates a disease that he did not want, and that is linked to the issue of blood, present throughout the novel. There is the question of whether she has the same blood as him. To what extent does the father, after all the transfusions they gave him, still have Italian blood? I have not resolved the issue of the body and working on it in the novel is my way of continuing to think about it. I totally agree with the phrase of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, “the body is where you lose footing”.
NEWS: It is striking that in this extreme situation the character of the mother reproaches her for things that have happened in the past…
Zito: It’s just that the mother doesn’t know what to do with it either. She doesn’t know how to handle the pain of her future parting.
NEWS: Is it true that you grow when you stop judging your parents? Or the other way around, when does he judge them?
Zito: (Doubt) It’s not about judging. The judgment implies an asymmetry that must be demolished. When one grows up he begins to see parents as human beings. You can realize the responsibilities they must have had and stop the “oh, well, it’s my mom, it’s my dad” itch. Endowments may fall. There it grows. Then, in reality, sometimes, after all that going around, to stop seeing the parents as the parents, up there, and to see them as human beings, the relationship usually improves. If the parents allow it. But I don’t think it has to do with the trial.
NEWS: How do you transform something real into fiction?
Zito: There is some formula. I have a scene that I remember because it happened and I ask him a lot of questions. Are all these characters necessary? Should this happen now or should it happen later? I start to do something I call “distortion” and which consists of starting from a real scene, but seeing what is appropriate. That operation is kind of ruthless. If it was a family photo and you have to sacrifice a couple of characters who wanted to appear in the photo, I don’t care (laughs). Send the text. If it is useful for the character to be there, it stays and is accepted. I am also attentive to see if the way of functioning of a character must be exacerbated or distorted. It is a procedure like that of cartoonists who take a face and enlarge an eye because they are not looking for the person to look pretty.
NEWS: Can you anticipate what your next book is about?
Zito: It is a novel that will close what unexpectedly, for me, became a trilogy. The three books have different characters, but they revolve around mourning. In “Rara” there is the death of the son, in “Vos”, that of the father; and the one I’m writing is about the death of a mother.
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