First Person

In this collection of eleven autobiographical stories written between 2011 and 2025, Margarita García Robayo delves into the most intimate realms to challenge the myths we tend to regard as sacrosanct—father, mother, family, home, intimacy, partner, sex—and to reveal the cracks from which a life emerges. Writing with candour and humour, she reveals her inner self. The pieces explore love and falling in love, obsessions, friendship and desire. They also address the contradictions of motherhood, the frustrations that come with it and the way it reshapes one’s personal map.

Her relationships with older men become entangled with the shadow of her father, while her mother’s mental health crises are observed through the lens of everyday life, thereby creating a kind of domestic landscape.

The volume includes two new pieces: "What’s on Your Mind? The Search for Meaning in Writing” and "Full House" which explore writing as a form of resistance against the fictions we use to carve out a place for ourselves in the world.

Margarita García Robayo’s work is a testament to thoughts that, as Leila Guerriero notes in the foreword, “do not shine in the majestic domes of the grandiloquent, but rather in the small hells and paradises hidden in everyday life.”