Two unlikely sisters

Red light. As chance would have it, I stop next to a group of girls, three in particular, with long hair, subtle tattoos, and the light-heartedness of someone barely out of their teens. The change to green on Aragó Street is so prolonged that, despite the hum of traffic, the wait allows me to catch glimpses of the conversation they're having. One of them blurts out to the other two: "I want to die before I turn 60." Her words pierce my solar plexus like a katana, for that's the age I'm supposed to be, the threshold I'll cross in just three months. Green light. We cross the road together. The girls continue on their way, leaving me alone on the other sidewalk, stunned, clinging to the phrase like a shipwrecked person to a plank. I rummage in my bag. No sign of notebooks. I'll note, then, the dart on the endpapers of the book I'm carrying: Permanent Collection, by the Argentine writer María Negroni (Random House). That very book, at a time when all fears are running high.

It's very likely a provocation, a joke, but I wonder if the girl—she could easily be my daughter—had discussed the matter with her mother, if she had let out the shotgun blast at her point-blank range: "I want to die before I'm your age." What could she have seen in the mutual mirror that reflects them? Negroni, in fact, settled accounts with his mother in his previous book, The Heart of Harm: "My mother, the most harmful and most fervent occupation of my life," he wrote. That mother who so resembled Joan Fontaine, who would not abandon her lipstick until the end of her days, even with her broken bones, her headache, her overprotection, the phrases that will remain engraved in the clay of memory: "What do you want? A life like mine? To get married? To have children?" A bird dressed in a white nightgown with a pink morning dress draped over her shoulders.

Maria Negroni and Joan Didion work on autobiography without using the 'I' as a spectacle.

Mothers and daughters, an endless literary conversation. Also coming out in the next few days is an interesting book on the subject, a posthumous work by Joan Didion: Notes for John (also from Random House), the diary the American woman kept for a few months between 1999 and 2000, while undergoing psychoanalysis to unravel her alcoholism, depression, and, above all, the complex relationship she had with her adopted daughter, Quintana Roo. What a contradiction! The daughter saw her as an overly distant woman, while the writer lived in terror, imagining that one day she would be taken away from her.

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Negroni and Didion work on autobiography from different perspectives. The former pours acid on it and dissolves it into a subtle, almost ghostly poetic quality; the author of The Year of Magical Thinking, on the other hand, dissects her lived experience down to the core of the social mechanisms that permeate us. But neither uses the self as a spectacle; in both, intimacy is filtered and distilled to help the reader feel the tremor of still being alive.