“From Her Pain, To My Pen” – Guadalupe Nettel On The Emotional Challenges Of Writing Someone Else’s Truth In Her Novel, Still Born 

Guadalupe Nettel is the author of Still Born – Dua’s Monthly Read for May for the Service95 Book Club. Here, she shares the real inspiration behind her beautiful novel, and the complexities of telling a true story through fiction...

Some stories are written like an intuition, taking years to decipher, and some stories are written as a revelation. Still Born was the latter. Its writing was inspired by the experiences of a very close friend who had been through a difficult time, and emerged from it not quite unscathed but stronger, like someone who crosses a dark, dangerous forest by night, surviving attacks from an array of raging animals. My friend had managed to turn the tragedy that befell her into a life full of meaning, even happiness at times, despite all its difficulties – and this filled me with deep admiration.

One day, after spending the afternoon with her and her family, I felt the need to write her story; to leave behind an account of the feat that these four people – my friend, her husband, their daughter and their childminder – had silently carried out. I didn’t want to do it without her consent, however, so I asked if she would let me. She requested a few days to think about it. My friend is a very private woman. She reveals almost nothing about her life, nor does she post any photos or opinions on social media, and so it seemed very likely that she wouldn’t agree to it. Despite my fears, however, she accepted my proposition. 

Writing someone else’s story is very difficult. It never turns out how they expect. As detailed and close to the facts as a tale might be, writing inevitably deforms reality, which often hurts whoever lived through the events being recounted. I asked my friend her reasons for accepting, and what she hoped for from the book. She replied: “I want families like ours to be visible.” Her answer moved me. Without knowing quite when, I had joined a cause: that of people who live with a disability and those who care for them.

Before sitting down to write, I suggested that we find somewhere for her to tell me about things exactly as she had lived them: her emotional journey; her fears and her hopes. We spent a month meeting twice a week in a café opposite the gallery where she worked. There, I would take out a tape recorder and say: “Tell me.” I also interviewed her husband, once during a long walk in the park, opposite the lake where, in one scene in the book, they both start crying for the first time. As I listened to both of them speak, it became clear that I would never be able to tell the story faithfully or truthfully if I did so from their perspective, but that I needed to understand it in order to give their experience the space it deserved.

Making Laura the narrator allowed me to tell the story with a little distance, and to give friendship a central role in the work. Friendship occupies a very important place in my life and I wanted the book to pay tribute to its immense power. Laura also allowed me to include a point of view rarely explored in literature: that of women who choose not to be mothers and find themselves constantly questioned by society. Bringing in the story of her neighbours, Doris and Nicolás, provided some breathing space; it was an escape valve that let me tell my friend’s story without drowning, and without drowning the reader in anguish and despair. The two characters were drawn from some neighbours I had when I lived in Barcelona. The boy, whose face I never actually saw, screamed each day with such rage that one could only guess why he did so.

My neighbours have always been a rich source of inspiration for me. I was keen to write about the experience of the solitary, isolated and difficult motherhood that women with depression can have. I’ve known several since childhood and I consider them real heroines. In this way, a kind of mosaic came together, formed of motherhoods that differed from the model family and the appearance of outward ease that has characterised the maternal stereotype for centuries. I enjoyed writing in the slightly forceful voice of Laura, who, through observing her friend and her neighbour, understands with total clarity the injustice that society has historically visited on women, burdening them with a task that is herculean for one person – even for a couple – without offering them any kind of state aid.  

The deep respect I felt for my friend’s experience was both a creative boundary and a condition that made me take great care, which is something I like about the book: it was written with a firm intent to protect her. After finishing the first draft I gave it to her to read and she realised that I was being too cautious. “This story is yours now,” she told me, “make it your own, invent whatever you like. You can kill us all if you want to.” Her attitude seemed immensely generous to me. And so, I reworked the text from the beginning and added new characters and ideas, in particular the rivalry between her and Marlene.

I’ve always felt that literature feeds on the things that make up a writer’s environment. In the same way that bread takes on a particular flavour depending on the microorganisms absorbed by the dough from the surrounding air, my stories enfold millions of small occurrences, tensions and conversations that take place over the course of the creative process. When I was writing the book, a pair of pigeons installed themselves on my balcony. I would hear them cooing for hours while I sat working. From my window, I watched the pair build a nest and, later, I saw two small eggs appear.

The pigeons’ presence and the effort they put into their reproductive task made me investigate the different forms of rearing that exist in the animal world. I realised that there are infinite ways of going about it. Among other things, I found out that most mammals have developed an evolutionary strategy of raising their young collectively. If you observe closely, wolves, lions, elephants, even dolphins and whales, care for their young either in a pack or in groups of females.

Acts of care are at the center of the novel. The narrator cares for her friend and her neighbour Doris, who in turn cares for her son Nicolás. Alina, Aurelio and Marlene give all their attention to this fragile child whose life is always in danger. It is this care that creates an environment that favours not just Inés’ survival, but her living out her full potential. I would like for readers, men and women, to ask themselves what strategies we can find or recuperate from the past in order to better endure – and enjoy – our children’s infancy. What other kinds of family are possible? What different forms can motherhood take? 

In the years I was writing Still Born, there were powerful protests against femicide in Mexico City. A police officer had abused a teenage girl and then murdered her to prevent her from reporting him. We found out because a security camera caught the moment he put her in his patrol car. Many of us women were enraged by the crime. After over a decade of peacefully protesting and being ignored, Mexican women decided to up the ante, painting graffiti on historic monuments and even setting fire to a police station. It outraged a lot of people, who accused the protestors of violence, but through their actions femicide entered the national conversation. It stopped being tabloid fodder and became front page news. Since I was writing a book about women, I couldn’t leave out the precarity and feminist militancy that define my city. All these things went into the novel, thanks to my friend’s open-mindedness.

When I think back on how I wrote the book, it occurs to me that I built it in the same way that birds build nests, not with any one material but with whatever they find nearby: twigs, feathers, fabric, plastic straws, scraps of cardboard. From afar, all nests look the same, but in reality,l each one is made of very different things, even when built by the same bird. Books are like that, too.

Discover more in Dua’s video interview with Guadalupe here