Laura Baeza doesn’t like kitsch. Perhaps that is why he loves Mariana Enríquez, the author who tells from fantasy about the terror of the Argentine dictatorship. Or the dark music of Pearl Jam, his favorite group to the point that his first novel, Burning Mist (Alfaguara, 2021), published this September, begins with a phrase from him. A book from which he cut almost 100 pages because “it was a bit cheesy in some parts, and then I realized that it did not belong to the universe I was telling.” The universe he was telling: Esther, a Mexican self-exiled in Barcelona, thinks she sees her sister, Irene, a young woman with schizophrenia in the television broadcast of some riots in the State of Hidalgo, a young woman with schizophrenia who escaped from the center where she was interned, to finish buried in a gutter at age 21 along with seven other trafficked women.
Through the memories of the protagonist, Baeza (Campeche, 33 years old) opens a world in which spaces and times intersect to address the difficulty of family relationships, mental illness in children, paternal abandonment – ”a constant, at least in this country ”- the feelings of guilt and the capacity for redemption. All with the crisis of femicides, violence and disappearances that Mexico suffers as a backdrop. An ambitious storytelling, which required four years of research and documentation, six weeks of writing, and two years of proofreading.
The author is especially interested in recounting violence, “especially that exercised against women”, and mental health in children: “What happens to parents when one of their children is misdiagnosed, and how their lives change, but also how the life of those who suffer from the disease changes. A fence is created around him, for better or for worse. This is the case of Irene ”. To avoid romanticizing or making judgments about such a complex reality, it was documented through a couple of psychiatrist friends and relatives with a case of schizophrenia in the family, she explains sitting on a park bench in the Roma Norte neighborhood, in Ciudad from Mexico.
He also investigated how journalists and groups that follow the trail of missing women work. “I read a lot of testimonies, things from the newspaper, things first hand. I do not like the red note, but I found that many times even that can be useful in the search. All those tabloid publications with explicit photos of the victims at some point can be useful. ” And he adds: “It gives me courage that I, who dedicate myself to writing, if I disappear, they may look for me for a year or six months. But there are many other people that no one will look for. Many undocumented women, who disappear and there is no rescue of their memory or their identity. And it seems terrible to me that even in death we are selective as a society ”.
With the character of Octavio, an investigative journalist from Veracruz who lives in hiding and away from his wife and daughters after receiving death threats, but decides to help Esther follow Irene’s trail as an act of redemption, tries to reflect another reality: that of the reporters whose involvement with their work, and the danger of it, ends up causing them to neglect themselves and their families “until they become blurred as people.” “It surpasses you. You become an automaton too. That is why many people abandon journalism at some point, ”he continues.
“I come from a fragmented family”
“There is a lot of me in the novel. I come from a fragmented family, I grew up under the care of other people because my mother had to work. Many of my concerns are told through the voices of other characters ”, he adds. The autobiographical doses are noticeable especially when he narrates the childhood of the two sisters, in towns in the Mexican countryside. To create his characters, he was inspired by many aspects of his life. For example, after the murder of her sister, the protagonist decides to leave Mexico forever, and gets a job in Barcelona, a city where the author herself studied for eight months in 2013, until she ran out of money. “Like Esther, I also used to watch the Mexican news on television when I was there. At first I was very angry because I thought that we are not only the horror that we paint the world. But we are, and there are both good and bad things ”.
Baeza lived until the age of eight in Veracruz. After the divorce of his parents, he went to live in Campeche with his maternal family. He arrived in Mexico City in 2015, to try to restart his life, he says. “I felt that where I was, I was not writing, I was in limbo.” At first, she worked as a violin teacher, an instrument that she has played since she was a child thanks to the influence of her maternal grandfather, a musician. He stayed for a while doing substitutions, then in an academy. He left it last year: “I was not 100%, and I was disrespectful not to give them my full attention.” Now, he lives by writing and editing, correcting texts of different styles for various publishers. He hasn’t played the violin in a long time, although he would like to get it back at some point. The music accompanies him, however. The six weeks it took to give birth Burning Mist, was constantly listening to a playlist with more than 100 songs grunge. In addition, together with several friends to perform Knobs Set, a live broadcast through social networks where every Sunday they talk about music, books or movies that have been relevant that week.
He says that the teenager who was would be delighted to publish in Alfaguara. That she has always read, but that the first time she dreamed of being a writer was after the editions of Momo and The endless story (Michael Ende) from the publisher. From then on, she began to spend hours sitting in front of a computer, “writing what I wanted, what I could, I imagined many things”. At that time, what most caught his attention was fantasy, although later his interests took other paths. The rigor reached the age of 20, when he did a literary workshop, “and I realized that writing requires professionalization.” In 2017 he presented two storybooks, Cherry blossom season and Orchestral rehearsal, to the National Prize for Narrative Gerardo Cornejo and the National Prize for Short Story Julio Torinados, respectively. He won both times, and both works were published as part of the award.
In fact, he now has two other storybooks in his hands, a genre that he loves. “I try to read a lot of stories because I think it requires more attention, you can’t neglect a single word.” In addition, he is preparing his next novel, which will deal with “the teenage abduction.” “I am very interested in how teenagers think. I’m sure my concerns weren’t those of the boys at all now. That is why I am not a mother, I have a deep terror of everything that happens. It terrifies me to think that it is a risk to be a girl in a country like the one we have today ”.
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