Visceral: Essays

What does it mean to move with a woman’s body through a misogynistic world? María Fernanda Ampuero, one of the greatest writers of the new wave of Latin American gothic fiction, answers this question in this personal essay collection that’s part analysis, part confessional, and part horror story.

Through vivid personal details—finding a corpse in the shade of a colorful parasol during the pandemic, remembering a disintegrating relationship through a letter to a stuffed mouse, slowly realizing she is being abducted by a Tinder hookup, imagining herself a barbarian on the streets of Madrid—and with surreal dark humor, Ampuero traces her memories of colonizers and exiles, parents and childlessness, lockdown relationships and lost innocence, fatphobia, mental illness, and writing as a practice for surviving all of it. What emerges is one woman’s account of what it means to live in a human body—oppressed, ailing, and outraged—told as only Ampuero can.