In the Margins

His very obsession with the new, immediately present in his work, derived from the awareness that writing was chained to writing; that every word had its tradition; that every first language was hatching a second

This is precisely what happens to our efforts to write: the words are ready para formar el libro, says María Guerra, and yet they won’t stay in the form, they overflow the margins, get lost in the wind.

As soon as we try to write something, one more problem regarding the inadequacy of the writing is added to those I’ve tried to list: that not a single page, whether polished or rough, speaks our truth as women completely, in fact often doesn’t speak it at all.

And clichés were once true sentences that dug a way out among clichés.

Thus writing is a cage and we enter it right away, with our first line. It’s a problem that has been confronted with suffering,

And I should emphasize that every book read carries within itself a host of other writings that, consciously or inadvertently, I’ve taken in. That is, writing about our own joys and wounds and sense of the world means writing in every way, always, knowing that we are the product, good or bad, of encounters and clashes, sought out and accidental, with the stuff of others.

Everything, in writing, has a long history behind it.

Writing is getting comfortable with everything that has already been written—great literature and commercial literature, if useful, the novel-essay and the screenplay—and in turn becoming, within the limits of one’s own dizzying, crowded individuality, something written. Writing is seizing everything that has already been written and gradually learning to spend that enormous fortune. We mustn’t let ourselves be flattered by those who say: here’s someone who has a tonality of her own.

We have to accept the fact that no word is truly ours. We have to give up the idea that writing miraculously releases a voice of our own, a tonality of our own: in my view that is a lazy way of talking about writing.

You hear? My, my, my. How often we repeat that possessive adjective.