“I will start by saying that I did not want to write this book,” says the Colombian writer Amalia Andrade (Cali, 35 years old) in the first pages of her most recent book I don’t know how to show where it hurts (Planet, 2023). Andrade’s presence is overwhelming. He extends into every corner of the places he steps on and creates a kind of powerful energy around him that is always on the verge of exploding. It’s been almost ten years since he published his first book You always change the love of your life, and now she presents one in which she captures several years of loneliness, of readings that seemed endless, of sadness, of a new and unimaginable pain for her, but also of gratitude that pulses in her body and with the sensation of transparency that only those who experience They have risen from the darkest place within.
When she was very little, Amalia Andrade was told by her aunt that she was made “for very big things.” It was a phrase said and received with sincere and deep affection and without a desire for perfection. Now, at 35 years old, she understands that those words marked her forever, and that they helped her become a better person who is grateful for what she has and who feels respect and affection for those who have taken her to the place where she is. . She also remembers that The Mammaas she called him, compared her to a princess in a cartoon series that they sat down to watch together on television: The princess and the Pea, which tells the story in which a princess, lying on many mattresses, cannot sleep well because under all of them there is a pea that makes her uncomfortable. “That’s how sensitive you are, and it’s not bad.”
The books that precede I don’t know how to show where it hurts, have led Andrade to become one of the great representatives of what the publishing industry has called “sales phenomenon”, since more than a million readers have purchased her books and that first title that broke all the records It has already been translated into languages such as German, Polish or English. In these titles, the author mixes her skills as an illustrator and her fresh and current ability to speak in a simple way about topics as complex as mental health, love, prejudices, patriarchy, her own life. she. Therefore, this book appears as a significant leap in her career, but also as an exercise in which she has managed to recover the language and a little about her identity.
In 2019, Andrade faced what she has described as the strongest and saddest thing that has happened to her in her life. The impact of that episode was so powerful that she didn’t know how to take it. For several years she took refuge in her house, with her cats, her partner and her pajamas, and she realized that, for the first time, everything she had told her readers about doing something with her pain was not working. , not in those circumstances: ”It was absolutely devastating. Everything that I was collapsed, she died, and along with it, the writer that I was too. She had no words, I had never felt so bereft, as if language had abandoned me. And she didn’t want to tell people those things that she used to tell him, like, hey, turn your pain into other things. How am I going to tell people if there are people who feel these pains? There are pains with which absolutely nothing needs to be done,” she says.
Without written language, without words at his disposal, with a total feeling of bewilderment and loss, Andrade began to take photographs of almost everything and turned it into the material for his new book. He stopped his research of many years immersed in popular science texts, essays, etc., to begin writing from his pain, once he was able to name it. “I guess I have to be consistent and do what I say I am. Otherwise, who would it be? A writer who does not write. A daughter of three mothers and at the same time, daughter of no one. Too bad a cartoonist for those who draw and not such a writer for those who write…”, she says on one of the pages of the book.
Amalia Andrade projects energy and sensitivity, surely like when she was a child and watched cartoons with the mom. He allows himself to cry at times and share with those closest to him those moments that remain frozen in time and that define the construction of the strongest bonds. He has also managed to convey it to those who read it. “Things always happen when I present my books. They never let me be moved. For example, when I presented Things you think when you bite your nails, a book about my anxiety, it happened to me in Bogotá that an Army General, in uniform, stood in the middle of the public, in a place full of people, to say ‘hello, this book has been useful to me and I want to talk to you about me anxiety,’” she says excitedly. In I don’t know how to show where it hurts, He has finally learned to recognize his pain, to put words and photos and whatever is within his reach. She has understood that she can also get out of the biggest, most terrifying and deepest pain.
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