The writer Cristina Rivera Garza (Matamoros, Tamaulipas, 61 years old) took three decades to reconstruct her little sister’s story. Book after book, every novel, every essay and every poem took her there: to Liliana, murdered in 1990, at the age of 20, by her ex-boyfriend. The result was Liliana’s invincible summer (Random House), a shocking book that won him the Pulitzer in 2024 and which will premiere this November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, as a theatrical monologue at the Conde Duque Cultural Center, in Madrid. The show is performed by the actress Cecilia Suárez, the adaptation of the text is the work of Amaranta Osorio and the direction is by Juan Carlos Fisher.
Rivera Garza arrives on time for her appointment at the Casa de México in Spain. It’s a cold, gray day in November, and it drags on a bit dysrhythmia —he has just landed in Madrid from the United States, where he lives—. He sits down calmly, takes off his coat and begins to talk. She wears small golden glasses that contrast with her long gray hair, glasses that are reminiscent of those her sister wore in the photographs known of her. “I don’t want people to know Liliana as a victim, but as a nice, intelligent and funny girl,” she says, and underlines the importance of building a collective memory that honors that memory and that of thousands of other murdered women.
Accustomed to crossing literary and geographical borders, the Mexican writer is a free woman who moves between narrative, historical research, poetry, critical theory and non-fiction, but always with stories full of sensitivity, which speak of something more: because the personal is political and in Mexico 10 women are killed every day, according to official statistics. This background has made her one of the most recognized Latin American authors today.
Ask. When did you feel ready to write your sister Liliana’s story?
Answer. You’re never really ready to write. Many times writing is imposed in the process. But I don’t think I was ready until we were ready as a society to tell this story in a different way.
Q. As?
R. One that questions hegemonic patriarchal narratives and makes way for the perspectives of women and their communities. Writing, with its great critical capacity, can break the narrative that exists in society. I didn’t want to stay in murder and crime. I really wanted readers to experience what I felt when I opened my sister’s boxes and felt like I was there. I tried to honor as much as possible what he had left me and I stopped seeing the victims as something inert. Recently, Irish writer Roisin O’Donnell told me that the best way to refer to women like Liliana should not be as “victims” but as “targets of violence.”
Q. Did you find out something about your sister that you didn’t know?
R. Many things. Liliana’s sense of humor, her sarcasm, which everyone then alluded to. I knew Liliana was nice, funny, but her degree of irony, it seems, was legendary. I also knew that I wrote, but I didn’t know to what extent. That’s why in the book I say that at that time she was the real writer of the family.
Q. What did it mean for you to dive 30 years later into the boxes that held Liliana’s papers?
R. As always with files, you don’t know what you’re looking for until you find it. At first I wanted to know names and telephone numbers to reopen the investigation and what the archive gave me was something completely different and overwhelming. Collected there were Liliana’s letters, her notes, her notes, the kind of things that are now left on Instagram or TikTok. Little pieces of life that I had to take away and that jumped out at me.
Q. You talk about pain a lot in your work. How do you reconcile such great pain with the need to write this story?
R. In cases of violence like these, duels are usually very silent, with force. They are marked by guilt and shame. This was radically transformed with the publication of the book and had to do with extending pain to others and embracing them through the language of pain. Unfortunately, or fortunately, sexist violence is a tragedy that affects many people. Telling a story is also a form of denunciation.
Q. Your book has created a community in many countries, what do you take away from all this?
R. I have had very significant, very intimate conversations with readers, very young ones, for whom Liliana’s story or the meeting with Liliana, as they say, was a turning point. They did things that are before our eyes and that even now are difficult to name, such as jealousy, manipulation or blackmail.
Q. What was it like talking to your sister’s friends after so many years?
R. Phew! I was struck by their generosity and how they opened their memories. The conversation had been stagnant for 30 years and, for all of us, it was the first opportunity to think together and talk about an event that would forever impact our lives.
Q. Do you think this is also a way to do justice?
R. Decidedly. Collective memory in favor of the victims is also justice. At first I thought justice was criminal, even punitive. But I realized that there are other ways to do justice. Even if legal justice was not achieved, it was very important for the memory of Liliana and other women we lost to sexist violence to remember them in this way. It’s a key factor in the kind of world we’re building. That Liliana and the book about Liliana are part of the fight to eradicate gender violence and femicide moves me greatly.
Q. What contribution can theater make to a book like this?
R. I see it as a kind of translation. The language in theater is different. Seeing the scene, the people, the lights, the breaths, the looks, implies an experience, an exhaustion that the reader of the book does not have. Yesterday was my first contact with the show on stage and there was a silence imbued with presence. There was a very strong connection from the audience with Cecilia (Suárez) which moved me.
Q. You say that the lack of language condemns us, that what is not named does not exist. What can you do when words fail?
R. There are many things we can do, among others, talk more and not repeat that these crimes are crimes of passion. Gender violence starts from inequality and has a structural root. Seeing it from the women’s perspective shows that it is a crime that grows, from the accumulation of vile acts, until it is too late.
We must also draw attention to the participation of the State in guaranteeing the safety of all its citizens and to the urgency of reducing the rates of impunity which, in Mexico, in the case of femicides, are 95%.
And finally, it is important to have self-criticism as a society. For too long we have shown great tolerance towards the suffering of women.
The 016 telephone line assists victims of sexist violence, their families and those around them 24 hours a day, every day of the year, in 53 different languages. The number is not recorded on the phone bill, but the call must be canceled from the device. You can also contact via email016-online@igualdad.gob.esand via WhatsApp on 600 000 016. Minors can contact the ANAR Foundation telephone number 900 20 20 10. In case of emergency it is possible to call 112 or the telephone numbers of the State Police (091) and the Civil Guard (062). And if you can’t call you can use the ALERTCOPS application, from which an alert signal is sent to the Police with geolocation.
