Here unfolds a long letter addressed to two recipients: the narrator herself and the ghost of her father. The author confronts different deaths, both physical and symbolic: the erasure of her father’s consciousness, the decline of her own health, and the pains and anxieties inflicted throughout her life by a mind that seems designed to endure suffering.
In this making of Alejandra Soria explains how she wrote Resistencia (ADEL).
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Resistencia emerged from within me the night I saw my father’s flesh laid bare by tubes and probes. It seemed impossible that the boundaries of his existence would end there, defined by a cold, hard hospital sheet. Voiceless and probably unconscious. As days passed, memories of my life by his side flooded my brain, heavy and warm, like the torrent of blood that inundated his. They became intrusive, persistent. Howls that resisted silence until they were written.
*
Truth be told, there wasn’t even a delineated creative space—ritualistic, routine—as initially there was no plan to craft a complete text, much less one that would be published. I jotted down ideas, sensations, and emotions as if they were photographs for an album. Months went by, and while my body healed, my father’s body did not awaken. What had once united us, the word, his voice, had died. I found myself alone with his silence. Facing this void, the notes I had been making presented themselves as a possibility: an impossible dialogue with my father. Now the word would have to bind us from memory and writing.
How could I shape a life and justify its writing? I did not want to tell his life or mine, but ours. The story of the relationship between an unconventional father, with more shadows than certainties, and his only daughter, who throughout her life has wrestled with turning her father into Frankenstein, descending into hell with him, denying him, or sublimating him. Each decision confronts her with the father, and that rocky, forked, reconnecting path is the story of her own existence. The story began to take form in my head, and what followed was finding the narrative thread that would tie together all the snapshots I had written for many months. Still, at that moment, I had no other justification than to seek a new way of relating to my silent father. To rescue him from the darkness he inhabited through words.
Como I am not a writer and the blank page paralyzes me, I chose to write in the phone’s notes app. A tiny, unpretentious space, available at any moment and anywhere. It was not intimidating, and it took away the formality of “being in the act of writing.” The ritual became part of my daily life, and I could do it while returning to being a mother to my son after the treatment. I wrote entire chapters while waiting in the school line to pick him up, while I accompanied him to soccer practice, in some dull school meeting, or wherever the idea seized me.
I cannot deny that this minimalist writing system eventually became untenable and was the source of a structural problem that nearly made me abandon the project. But that would come later, because what followed were boxes filled with all my father’s writings. For my father truly was a writer and, above all, a poet. He produced texts of political, musical, poetic, and essayistic character; almost all of them so vitriolic that, for one reason or another, they had made him undesirable to many people. So recognizable that he chose to spend his last years sheltered in a house without a doorbell or a telephone. I devoted myself to reading them to find him, because each time I tried to explain many of his attitudes, he proved even more elusive. He slipped away between the words. Elusive as he had always been.
I began to hear his voice again in his texts. His phrases spoke to me, and I could have that conversation I thought was lost forever. As I grew to enjoy autofiction, I wanted to play with intertexts. Crossed voices. Just to try, to experiment, because I wasn’t writing anything seriously; that is what writers do, like my father, and I am not a writer. In one chapter I mixed the voices of three characters along with quotes from a political text his father published in the newspaper and the ambient sound of the afternoon radio news. Since chaos is my expertise, I ventured. I enjoyed playing with the dialogues as if it were one of the activities I prepared for my son. The result seemed acceptable to me, and I chose to use that device at certain moments in the book. Moreover, this swarm of records helps to illustrate our family dynamics.
*
When I finished the first version, about four years after beginning those initial notes, two things became clear. One. I had a finished text. The idea of going a step further didn’t seem a fantasy. Two. If I truly wanted a decent text, whether for publication or self-publishing, I would necessarily need an editor. I was aware of where my manuscript was leaking: especially the tangled structure that had crept in from its dispersed origin, born more of inner turmoil and grief than of literary intention. Now, how could a forty-year-old woman with no prior publications and no contacts in the publishing world find an editor? I was lucky. A literature-school acquaintance, now based in Barcelona, and her colleague helped bring discipline to the craft. Having monthly revisions to deliver forced me to carve out a space reserved solely for creative work. I dedicated my mornings to writing while my son was at school and my husband at work. The three of us worked on the text for two years, adding, trimming, polishing. Rearranging the chapters again and again. We reached a point where the text no longer felt finished, but we also couldn’t conceive new directions. We tacitly recognized that the structural hurdle was insurmountable, and we decided to part ways. I let the text rest.
But I did not stop thinking about it. Pondering it. Finding the formula that would let me organize it. I needed fresh eyes. A different reader. So, naive as I was, I did what anyone in my shoes would do: search the internet for literary agencies and email them asking for editor services. It goes without saying that the reply was virtually nil. Many emails weren’t even opened. But I did not give up. Soon I found an agency that would work with me as long as I paid a reading report and it was reasonably favorable. A door opened. Or not. After waiting a few weeks, the reading report arrived. Devastating. The report itself mattered little compared to its conclusions about my text. After paying several hundred euros, I received a mediocre and poorly written analysis. I contacted the agency, told them that I had been a literature professor and that what they had delivered was unacceptable even for a high school student. They did not concede the point, but they connected me with one of their best editors. And then the real work began.
“What do you want to achieve with the text?” was the first question the editor asked me. Honestly, I had no idea, but I did know that I wanted a well-written text faithful to my own style, regardless of whether it had a reader or not. We focused on solving the structural problem, because without doing so we would never have a comprehensible text. The editor proposed a solution so clear and obvious that I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it before: with different times coexisting, the most reasonable thing was to arrange the past chronologically. I returned to those six-year-old snapshots and drew a timeline. With this new order I continued polishing the text and took the opportunity to revise the narrative voice.
The text emerged as an impossible dialogue with my absent father, so it seemed natural to use the second-person voice for the narration. Along the way I was advised to switch to the traditional third-person voice to make it more accessible. Yet every time I returned to it and made corrections, I felt the second person was essential to the tone of the story. So I proposed to the editor to alter the voice and see how it worked. It was not a final change, just an experiment. And we liked the intimacy it lends the text. Now the challenge was to decide the formatting of the dialogues and the various intertexts.
In this moment the reading of Daniel and María, of Adel Editores, was essential. While I was seeking literary agencies I also began emailing various publishers in Latin America and Spain that claimed to accept unsolicited manuscripts. There was no reply. And there could not have been, because if Mail Tracker for Gmail is accurate, most of those emails were never opened. Yet I did not give up, because time was what I had gained by surviving the cancer treatment. Those who did respond were Daniel and María. It was not the automated replies many publishers issue, saying they will take months to respond if they are interested in the manuscript, and that no answer in a given period means they rejected it. Quite the opposite: they appreciated the trust I placed in them by sending my work, and with the utmost courtesy they said they would contact me whether they accepted the manuscript or not. After months of exchanged emails we reached a point where we formalized our relationship and made the final changes together.
Facing the doubt of whether to keep the dialogues within the text and interlaced citations, or to opt for the more traditional format, María and Daniel bet on my style because it materially reflects how life and literature are woven into the story. I was lucky to have found a publisher who respected the slow tempo of the writing, the multiple rewrites, my own mistakes, and above all the text’s inherent character. I could have stuck with that first version, but the editors’ readings of the manuscript over the years helped me find my own voice, refining those initial notes that exuded bile, guts, and rage in a work worthy of publication by Adel Editores. Its new home.
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Author: Alejandra Soria. Title: Resistencia. Publisher: Adel. Sale: Todos tus libros.