It wasn’t my idea. I gave a speech in Mexico City a while ago and the speech was a viral phenomenon. The publishers in Spain thought they were going to publish it as a little book. I read it and said, “This thing is totally outdated,” because in a short time #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, the protests of women in the street … so much had happened that was not mentioned in the speech. I said, “No, this is useless.” Then I started to think about my own trajectory and how I have lived the movement, because it has been almost simultaneous, you see? The women’s liberation movement is very old, but it really began with the pill in the 1960s, when women were able to control their fertility for the first time. That created a space that didn’t exist before, a space that my mother of course did not have – my mother was married for four years and had three children.
You started writing it just as we were starting to lock ourselves up because of the pandemic. What do you hope will happen now with the women’s movement?
The year of the pandemic has had everything paralyzed, but things continue to move forward. And feminism has joined other movements that are also on the streets, like Black Lives Matter, which is a subversion against the establishment, against a racist system. That same system, a chauvinist system, is what gives the male gender supremacy over other women, over other races, over people who have no power, over children. When we challenge the power of the establishment, we have so much in common that we can do it together. We have arrived to a moment were we must shake up the society we live in and try to establish a different, more sustainable, more just and better new normal for ourselves, for everybody.
How has the pandemic treated you?
Well, because what a writer needs is time, silence and solitude, and the pandemic has given me that. I’m a newlywed and look, the pandemic has been a litmus test because it’s like a long honeymoon that never ends (laughs). But in this honeymoon we have learned a lot as a couple, as a family, that can be extrapolated to humanity: We are forced to live on a fragile planet, in a limited space that has to be sustainable, that we have to keep in order and clean, otherwise we will perish. That we need patience, tolerance, compassion, kindness.