And I'm not even the same when I’m writing

About the Book

This is less a writing manual than a visceral confession about the craft of living and telling. Luis Mey, one of the most authentic and acclaimed voices in contemporary literature, delivers an atypical decalogue free of guilt and full of brilliant digressions. And I'm not even the same when I’m writing is no ordinary handbook of techniques but rather an intimate and ferocious dialogue in which the author explores how, what, and for what purpose to rummage through the “storeroom of useless things” in order to recover something worth living for.

The strength of this book lies in its demystifying approach. Mey invites readers to embrace the loneliness at the keyboard and to write from raw honesty, far from editorial postures. It is an essential work both for aspiring writers and for readers looking to grasp the psychology behind the creative process. Its prose, imbued with a liminal sensitivity, turns this essay into a cult piece on identity and literary resistance.    

Excerpt

An almost white nightgown

Some years ago, my four siblings and I, my mother, my father, and my grandmother—from whom Alzheimer’s hadn’t been able to get a word in the last three years—were in the middle of Christmas dinner, the family dinner, maybe the last one. She was ninety-seven. I had slipped in at some point that it might be the case that she had nothing left to say. My father, who no longer hit me because I was too old, surely schemed, in response to my remark, some way of ruining my mother’s life a bit more, even if she had nothing to do with it. That’s how our home worked. However, that Christmas unfolded normally: my father at the barbecue with the AM radio on, listening to reruns of La Noche de Mochín Marafioti, a program for incurable nostalgics that could play a tango as well as Paul Anka’s big hit.

My father was just that, an incurable nostalgic. And as such, he was never with the family. And I, who noticed it, was in charge of going back and forth to the barbecue to bring to the table whatever was ready.

In any case, his mother didn’t speak or look, she barely opened her mouth to swallow the mush my mother made for her. 

When my father had no choice but to sit with us, he took the seat at the head of the table, his mother to his left, I to his right, my mother in front of him, my siblings somewhere around, especially my youngest sister, more focused on her phone, waiting for a visit from her boyfriend or from some friend who wanted to go out somewhere.

In the kitchen, beside the dining-room, the TV said it had been a tough year, but if people stay together and all that. At the dining-room table, if someone wasn’t eating, they had a cigarette in their hand. We all smoked, and maybe the pact was that grandma’s illness didn’t matter as long as it didn’t prevent us from smoking.

No one had a future—except my older sister—so it was best to fight softly over how each of us chewed or how hard it was for the other to flick the ashes on the ashtray instead of onto the floor. It was then that my grandmother raised her head, looked at me, and said, “So, Luis? Have you gotten your writing degree?”

I took as deep a breath as I could and, given the silence from the others, replied, “No, grandma, but almost, I feel confident.”

She nodded and fixed her eyes again on the infinity of her plate. 

My father cried, found a phenomenal excuse to get forty percent more drunk than he had planned—or than his body demanded—celebrated his mother’s clarity and—I will never forget—seemed to reproach me for the fact that she had addressed me and not him, and he made it clear, before going off the rails, that it made sense because his mother, a decent person, was surely more worried about my future than I was. 

If that was the case, at least in the second part of his reflection he was absolutely right. As for my grandma, I remembered why she had asked me that. It was because of a night I stayed at her house on account of the violence taking place in mine. 

I would never have thought of spending a couple of nights at my grandmother’s, who had been a widow for some years now and whom I thought lived alone, but no: one of her daughters, my aunt, my brother’s godmother, lived locked inside a room. She would barely go out to go to the bathroom, grab the cigarettes my grandmother bought for her and left on the phone table, then greet me, and go back to her room. 

Always in a nightgown. An almost white nightgown, nicotinic and spectral. I, who was fifteen, took a notebook out of my school backpack—I was attending night school—and started writing something about a person who inhabited the house, some cliché, but who cared, at least I had been able to get out of my head—if only for a while—the madness at home. 

To end the story, my grandmother, who never got out of bed at night—it was three in the morning—stood on the living-room threshold, where I slept, and asked me what I was doing. “Writing,” I said. 

Many years later, Alzheimer’s, Christmas, and the unexpected return.

But she remembered that. Me, all of me, her grandchild, the son of her son, that’s what she remembered. And I, therefore, had to honor it, every day, with my effort: search for the title. 

 

 

Translated by Martín Juan - Edited by Alejandra Rogante