Josefina Licitra: “The process that brought me back to writing was slow.”

The new book by journalist and screenwriter Josefina Licitra begins with a breakup. Or two. On the one hand, the author broke her foot. And on the other, her bond with her father was severed after she published an article describing the difficulties of that relationship, marked by his exile in the late 1970s. That's why Crac (Seix Barral) has an unbeatable title.

Licitra previously published the books The Imprudent: Stories of Gay and Lesbian Adolescence in Argentina (Tusquets); The Others: A History of Greater Buenos Aires ; The Bad Water: Chronicles of Epecuén and the Sunken Houses; Let's Go: The Marvelous Brief Life of Marcos Abraham ; and 38 Stars: The Biggest Escape from a Women's Prison in History (Seix Barral).

Her chronicles have been included in several anthologies of the genre . One of them, "Pollita en Fuga," received the award for best text from the Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, then chaired by Gabriel García Márquez. She edited the magazine Orsai for years and now works as a scriptwriter and audiovisual consultant to overcome the blockage that her father's silence forced upon her.

–It's difficult to do this interview without turning it into an imitation of a therapy session. How did you construct the idea of "truth" in the device that is the book?

–The feeling you get, that every question about the book ends up leading to an immodest question about my family world, is the same one I get when I give my explanations. It's inevitable, on the other hand, since I published a book that talks about more than one thing—the birth of a vocation, a writer's relationship with his literary output, the possibility of working on a different narrative around the seventies—but which in turn requires a central element and a central plot for all those layers to emerge. And that element is the crisis with my father, told within a seven-day time frame. That, I believe, is the main narrative strategy: taking part of my family world and transforming it into a Trojan horse that smuggles in other themes that I'm also interested in developing. Then, as far as liberties go, I took those permitted by nonfiction in its "chronicle of the self" variant: I use tools typical of literature (careful with narrative structure, treatment of sources within a "character" framework), but I do so without inventing. Everything that happens in the book happened.

– Crac is a territory in which other texts are intertwined. You put together an edition with your father's letters. How did you portray the connection that correspondence created and its transformation?

I thought a lot about how to work with these letters, because there are so many of them and they don't have any flat areas (everything in them is interesting and publishable), but at the same time they needed editing because they couldn't all be published in full: making a complete transcription would be, among other things, anticlimactic. So I separated them by periods: childhood, puberty, adolescence, youth. Then I took the most essential elements from each of these sections and united them in a single text: a process that was made transparent within the book, as I explain how I work with that material and clarify that I created, with all those letters, an exquisite cadaver that runs through the entire structure.

–The voice of that father, the one in the letters, shifts from a loving approach to his young daughter to a more dogmatic one as the girl grows. How does that voice crystallize what's happening between them on an emotional level, and how did you construct that evolution?

–I think the evolution in the letters isn't so much linked to my father's changes in terms of dogmatism—my feeling is that he was always the same, ideologically—but rather to the condition of the father-daughter bond, which mutates as time does its work. I suppose that happens in many father-daughter relationships. There's a moment of idyll, of pure future, of assuming that your child will be made in the image of your imagination. There's another moment in which the child begins to want to decode the world with their own tools, even though they still need the shelter of their parents. There's a third moment of naive self-sufficiency, typical of adolescence, which generates some irritation in the adults. And there's a youth where the adult dialogue that this father and daughter will have from then on is rehearsed. These are the stages of life I tried to reflect in the letters. I didn't want to show the breaking of a bond, but rather the way in which the father-daughter relationship mutates and renews itself over time.

–Your articles have angered that father. Why, instead of a translation, is there a reworking from Portuguese to Spanish, and how did this change occur between versions?

–Each of these decisions is linked to the context of publication. The first article was written and published "spontaneously," that is: I didn't write it in response to any acute episode, but as a way of describing a situation that was hurting me. My father wasn't speaking to me, and I didn't understand why. That text formalized the problem in our relationship and caused part of my family to stop talking to me because I had exposed our problems. The second text, years later, was in response to something concrete. When the pandemic hit, I tried to reach out to my father and wrote him an email, and I received a very harsh response from him. A response that devastated me and included a very strong sanction on my writing, with one key detail: it wasn't entirely clear that he and my family had read the article in Portuguese, since Piauí magazine doesn't have all the material available online. In other words, I was being canceled without even having been fully read. So, I republished the text in Spanish and in Orsai, a magazine that has all its content freely available online. It was a way of saying, "If you're not going to talk to me anymore, at least know what I said." Since there was new information, I needed to update the original text, which is why the Spanish version has different elements.

–Reading the two articles and the book reveals a silence: there's something that journalistic texts put into words, something that the book shows, but doesn't name. Why did you choose to silence that element?

–It's not a resource, but there was an ideological choice regarding the text. I felt that introducing a line of partisan political conflict—talking about the rift in the family—was creating a distraction. Any relationship problem articulated around a political rift is adopting a disguise. The rift adds a layer of ideological depth—as contradictory as it may sound—that family problems, in my opinion, don't have, because family pain moves along a much less circumstantial path. I needed that crisis of intimacy to be exposed without narratives that would overshadow it.

–The father's mother and sister share his reactions: if he cancels his daughter's relationship, they also stop talking to him, even though each of them has their own relationship with that girl. How do you think the father's exile influences his family's automatic alignment in Buenos Aires when he decides to cut ties with his daughter?

–I'm not being original with this, but here I go: I feel that the exiles and the dead of the seventies have become a canon. And no one questions or interrogates a canonical figure. Even less so if the relationship with that person is mediated by affection and the weight of lineage and blood. What I do find surprising is that, in a scenario of family fracture, the field of meaning proposed by exile is more powerful than that proposed by the love between a father and a daughter. Exile is a sword of swords; it seems to kill everything.

–That aunt who soars with her kindness is a very interesting and mysterious character. Is there a connection between your interest in dance at this point in your life and your aunt's career as a professional dancer?

My aunt is both a mystery and a revelation. She's one of those archetypes buried by the narrative of the seventies. At that time, while my father was risking his life, my aunt was also doing something that required total dedication: she got up every day at five in the morning, traveled from La Plata to Buenos Aires, and studied at the Teatro Colón while completing her secondary education. Little was said in my family about that effort. Even I kept it hidden until I wrote the book. I do remember going to see her dance at the Colón throughout my childhood. I was fascinated by the plasticity and elegance of her body. I never considered whether my love for dance comes from there, but it's almost certain it does. Both because of my aunt, a classical dancer, and because of another aunt I have who dedicated her entire life to contemporary dance. Both left a mark that I picked up from a place of great need: I was born with a congenital malformation that gave me many insecurities as a child. And my way of compensating for them was by betting on my head—I mean my thinking—and the mastery of my body that sport and dance gave me.

–How did you deal with that terrible writer's block, and what happened when you finished the book?

–It was a very distressing block. For at least five years, there wasn't a day I didn't think "I'm not writing." It was horrible. I still celebrate the end of it. The process that brought me back to writing was slow and, I'd say, multidisciplinary. Therapy, a psychiatrist, affection, dance, reading, cannabis, walking the dog, music, love from a partner, a child, a mother, and friends. I grabbed onto everything I could, and it worked. Since then, I've felt a still immeasurable relief. As if half my mental hard drive had been emptied.

–The last one: the heroic narrative about the exiles and the disappeared pushes those who stayed in the country and didn't die into a less illustrious place. Why did you feel the need, as a narrator, to illuminate those lives through the figure of your mother?

–I give a tautological answer: I wanted to shed light on that area because it was dark. Because the unsung hero is the character one always wants to lift up. And if my mother is one of those heroes, given that she's also the person who shouldered my upbringing, a true self-made person, I can't imagine leaving her out of the story. She deserves a pedestal.