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“Gossiping has a really formal structure and poetic stances that we can’t put aside. I wanted to take gossiping and turn it into a literary form.” – Fernanda Melchor at @wheelercentre’s Broadly Speaking event with @Mieko_kawakami moderated by @roannagonsalves
“Even if my novel is about a murder, the heart of the novel is the experience of women.” – Fernanda Melchor
“Readers overseas are surprised poverty exists in Japan. They think there are no class issues in Japan and that everyone is middle-class.” – @mieko_kawakami
“Growing up as a girl in Mexico in a very misogynistic society, I grew up trying to understand why men do the things they do and why women hate each other and ourselves.” – Fernanda Melchor
“I agree when Breast and Eggs is described as a feminist novel, but it’s also a meditation on what it means for a human to give birth. I wanted to pose the question: who has the right to bring a human being to life?” – @mieko_kawakami
“Because of Japan’s economic situation, it’s becoming more and more difficult to get married and become parents.” – @mieko_kawakami
“There’s the unspeakable horror of being a mother in Hurricane Season. It talks about being a mother without the desire to become one. As we say in Spanish, they’re both sides of the same coin.” – Fernanda Melchor
“In Mexico, we are fighting for the right to legally interrupt pregnancies. It’s a reality that’s hurtful for women, particularly young women. Mexico is the number one place for teen pregnancies, where children have children.” – Fernanda Melchor
“It’s so worrisome. I wanted to write about that because I want people to empathise with these young girls. People say horribly things about them to justify the unjustifiable.” – Fernanda Melchor
“In the male-centric world we live in, literature has the power to change perceptions.” – @mieko_kawakami
“I believe literature is not necessarily the place to write what is ‘correct’. Literature can cause anxiety and conflict within the reader.” – @mieko_kawakami
“Literature isn’t the place for political statements, but it can make the other more human. The only way to write about these things is to have no pretension about changing things. If not, literature becomes a Sartre novel. Very boring.” – Fernanda Melchor
“I feel like literature is a totally feminine place that’s been taken by men in an institutionalised way. Finally it seems like audiences are interested again in stories by women. My fight is to make women’s stories universal.” – Fernanda Melchor
“When you want to write about the human experience, you can’t avoid writing about women.” – @mieko_kawakami
“Everything has become a question of personal responsibility in Japan due to neoliberalism. If you make an effort, it’s perceived that you can escape poverty.” – @mieko_kawakami
“What I write about is not what Japanese people, Japanese women especially, write about. But it’s very much the reality of Japan today.” – @mieko_kawakami
“In Mexico, not everyone has health insurance. The public education system has been losing each year its capacity to educate every child. I got to see a lot of this violence, which came from the state and organised crime and within families.” – Fernanda Melchor
“It was important for me to talk about the violence that we as women enact on to those we care about. We must not forget that we as women can be perpetrators against other women, children, elderly people, and our own partners.” – Fernanda Melchor
“If you only picture women as victims, you’re painting a caricature that has no life.” – Fernanda Melchor
“How can you love another woman if you don’t love yourself? But how can you love yourself if you haven’t been loved?” – Fernanda Melchor
“Everyone in Hurricane Season thinks love is going to redeem them. But love is like a fugitive butterfly; it’s fragile and they can’t grasp on to it and make it their own.” – Fernanda Melchor
“I love writing in Osaka dialect, but then there’s the problem of translation.” – @mieko_kawakami
“Translators tried to translate Osaka dialect into the Manchester dialect or South American English but in the end, we didn’t go with this approach. Osaka dialect has a melody, even when counting numbers. My translators translated the characters instead.” – @mieko_kawakami
“Spanish has this beautiful quality where it takes more effort to not understand each other than understand each other.” – Fernanda Melchor
“But Spanish is a language that’s been imposed on traditional Indigenous languages in Mexico. There’s a difference between Spanish in Mexico and Spanish in Spain.” – Fernanda Melchor
“I believe in the end there is nothing you can’t translate. You can convey the same meaning, or a meaning that is very much alike.” – Fernanda Melchor
