166. Alba de Céspedes — Forbidden Notebook with Joy Castro

KIM: Welcome to another episode of Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes.

AMY: We've covered fictional diaries on this podcast before. I'm thinking back to our third episode on E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady, and more recently, The Diary of a Lonely Girl by Miriam Karpilov. That was episode number 142. Kim, did you ever keep one of those secret diaries when you were a kid?

KIM: Over the years I had different ones with a lock and key. I love the idea, but I could never really stick to it for any length of time. That probably doesn't surprise you.

AMY: I would always lose the key, so then I would just be like, Oh, I guess get rid of this. 

KIM: Yeah, that said, the narrator of today's fictional diary would definitely have loved a sturdy padlock, maybe even a steel reinforced concrete bank vault for her illicit journal. The prospect that her written depository of private thoughts could be discovered by her family makes her paranoid because the words she is committing to paper feel downright dangerous. And yet, she can't give up her obsession with it.

AMY: Yeah, I'm reminded of that famous quote by the writer Muriel Rukeyser. "What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." This 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook, by Cuban Italian writer Alba de Céspedes, expounds on that theory by showing us the secret hopes, fears, fantasies, and doubts of a seemingly ordinary woman living in Rome in the early 1950s.

KIM: In a New York Times review of a 1958 English edition of this novel, de Céspedes was called "one of the few distinguished women writers since Colette to grapple effectively with what it is to be a woman." Famed Italian writer Elena Ferrante is also said to be a huge fan of this book, and we're very excited that we get to welcome back a previous guest to the show to discuss it.

AMY: So as they'd say in Italy, andiamo tutti! Let's raid the stacks and get started. 

[introductory music plays]

KIM: Our returning guest, Joy Castro, is the award winning author of literary thrillers, including 2012's Hell or High Water and 2021's Flight Risk, as well as a 2005 memoir, The Truth Book and Island of Bones, an essay collection, which received the International Latino Book Award. Joy is currently the Willa Cather Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, and you may remember that she joined us on the show almost two years ago to discuss the writer Margery Latimer and her fantastic novel, We Are Incredible. That's episode number 69 if you want to go back and have a listen.

AMY: Joy's most recent book, One Brilliant Flame, is a historical novel set in Key West and inspired by her ancestral history, and there is an oblique connection between that novel and today's lost lady, Alba de Céspedes. Welcome to the show, Joy. 

JOY: Thank you. Thank you both so much. It's wonderful to be back. 

AMY: Had you heard of her before you started writing One Brilliant Flame?

JOY: So yes and no. You mentioned Hell or High Water, and in that novel I named the protagonist Nola Céspedes because I'd been doing so much research about Cuba during the anti colonial period and I learned that Carlos Manuel de Céspedes in 1868 called for Cuba's independence from Spain. So he was an anti colonial revolutionary, but at the same time, he also freed all the enslaved Afro Cubans on his plantation. He knew that in good faith, he couldn't fight for his own freedom while enslaving other people. And so I was already aware of who he was, and I loved that kind of moral clarity, so I gave my protagonist that surname. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes comes up a few times in One Brilliant Flame, because he was so important to the Cubans in Key West. So the characters talk about him and so on. But Alba de Céspedes I had not heard of. I saw a tweet by the literary scholar Merve Emre, and she was reading an advanced copy of Forbidden Notebook. And I saw the surname of the author, Alba de Céspedes, and I was like, "That's an unusual name." So I did a little digging and was thrilled to find out that she is actually the granddaughter of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes. His son had been a diplomat and had married an Italian woman. They had had a child, and that was Alba. 

KIM: So she was born in Rome in 1911, and I'm not sure how much you know about her early years, Joy, but it sounds like she definitely inherited some of her freedom fighter grandfather's political gumption?

JOY: Absolutely, yeah, and there is, to my knowledge, no full biography yet in English, but what I've been able to find is that she married quite young, at the age of 15. She had a son already by the age of some sources say 16, some say 17, and then was divorced when she was 20. That was in 1931, and that's when her writing career really began. But during the 20s, Mussolini had risen to power in Italy, so she was really coming of age under a fascist dictatorship, and she was quite outspoken against fascism. She was jailed twice for her anti fascist activities, and two of her books were banned. And so that's a really interesting and rich kind of tension, because as the daughter of a diplomat and quite cosmopolitan, Alba de Céspedes would have known about the opportunities that were opening for women around the world, you know, in some places getting the vote, uh, college, entering the professions, free love, contraception, bathtub gin, flappers, right? So in some places things were really opening up in wild and exciting ways for women, and yet under fascism, procreation was seen as a woman's duty, and women were being pushed, quite forcibly in Italy and Germany, back into really rigid traditional gender roles. So there would have been a tremendous tension and an urgency on her part. She seems to have really been born a feminist and an outspoken political thinker.

KIM: Yeah. She's so young to be doing all this. 

AMY: I was thinking, also, if your father is a diplomat, that takes a certain bravery to be like, "Sorry, dad, I'm gonna, gonna ruffle some feathers."

KIM: Gotta go get arrested.

JOY: I think so. And, you know, I would be really interested in learning more. I would love to read a full biography, you know, to see how she did experience that time and understand the interiority that she was experiencing during that very early marriage and what caused her to leave it at the age of 20.

KIM: Yeah. And then to go on to write, she wrote eight novels between 1935, and you can only imagine that the war and the climate in Italy leading up to the war must've had an impact on her work. 

JOY: Absolutely. I think she was very interested in the connections between the micro political and the macro political. She circumscribes the action of Forbidden Notebook to a small domestic sphere, but it's definitely a politically engaged novel in many ways, and I think she was thinking about how larger political forces play out on the home front. And I think a lot of terrific women writers have done so around the globe, you know, I'm thinking of Mariama Bâ in her book, So Long a Letter, or Merce Rodoreda in Spain, who also rode under fascism. I mean, we could go on and on with that list, but who are exploring what does that mean in the private, in the personal sphere? How do those same energies affect us in the most intimate realms of our lives?

KIM: Yeah. Even Lorraine Hansberry, “A Raisin in the Sun.” We did an episode on that. I'm thinking of just taking what's going on outside and taking it into the domestic space.

JOY: Exactly. Exactly. So, uh, very soon after Rome was liberated in 1944, Alba de Céspedes founded and began to edit a really important journal of politics, culture, literature, and during its short run, uh, they lost financial backing by 1948, they published pretty much all the major figures in Italian politics and culture, but also writers from around the world. And in fact, another one of those writers that should join that small canon that I was just building out loud, Katherine Mansfield, who is one of my personal favorites and who also, um, she's just an exquisite master of capturing large political issues in the tiny, compressed, intense domestic space of the nuclear family. And it's interesting to me that de Céspedes resonated with Mansfield's work enough to publish it in Mercurio. She also published a fantastic essay by Natalia Ginzburg in 1948, called “On Women”. And this was provoked by the fact that there was a cultural debate in Italy around whether women should serve as judges. And so women had just gotten the national vote in Italy in 1945, believe it or not. So it was a matter for discussion as to whether women were fit to serve as judges given that, the thinking went, their sense of logic was often so different from that of men. So how could they be trusted to rule on court cases? In Natalia Ginsberg's essay she explores what she calls a dark well that she says women fall into. And for her, it is something that renders women's judgment fallible, or at least not reliable. Women fall into a kind of anguish or despair. And then de Céspedes includes her own response to that in the journal, but she sees that dark well as a rich source of humanity, compassion, of being able to plumb the depths of agony and then come back to the surface with the riches that she finds there. And so she thinks that that equips women very well for judging, both from the bench and in everyday life, you know. Of course, as a critic, she would have been quite invested in women's ability to judge and judge publicly.

 KIM: Listeners, if you loved that rousing America Ferrera monologue from the Barbie movie, you need to read this essay and de Céspedes’s beautiful response in their entirety. They're fairly short and we'll post them for you in our show notes.

AMY: Yeah, I feel like Forbidden Notebook was de Céspedes’s opportunity to sort of explore all these ideas about the female experience in much greater detail. So let's pivot now to discussing the novel. It was published in 1952. I think we all read the most recent translation that just came out, uh, translated by Anne Goldstein. Joy, can you set the book up for us and tell us a little bit about this diarist?

JOY: Yes, delighted. I just want to thank Astra House, the imprint that published the book, and Alessandra Bastagli, um, who was so fantastic and involved with that process and who kindly sent the advanced reading copy to me back before it came out. They did a really beautiful job. But to the novel, and I will say it was originally published serially in 1950 and 1951 in a very popular Italian illustrated magazine that featured photographs of big film stars from the era on its covers like Sophia Loren and Audrey Hepburn. So the novel first came out in short bits and was consumed by readers of that magazine, and interestingly, it was published, as I said, in 50 and 51. And the first diary entry is November 26th, 1950. So it would have had this tremendous sense of immediacy, of right-now-ness. And the mostly women who would have been avidly reading it, although, you know, many men did too, would have been in some ways similar to the diarist Valeria Cossati, who is a 43 year old working mother of two adult children, young adults, and a wife, she's a devoted wife to her husband, Michele, and they all live together in a fairly cramped apartment in Rome. She has an office job, though she doesn't admit to herself that she actually likes working until about halfway through the novel. Um, but to set things up, one day, on a Sunday, she's going out and the weather's beautiful, and she's on her own. She's going out to buy cigarettes for her husband so that she can have them on his nightstand when he wakes up, because he sleeps in late on Sundays. And it's just sort of lush and sensual and she's aware of herself and the weather and she wants to buy flowers so that she can carry them around and feel beautiful. So it's kind of this Mrs. Dalloway moment there at the beginning of the text. And she goes into the tobacconist and she sees a black notebook, the kind that she used to write in as a schoolgirl. And she's possessed, suddenly, by an impulse to buy this notebook. And curiously, according to the laws at the time, tobacconists couldn't sell notebooks on Sundays because on those days the stationery shops were closed, and so to prevent unfair competition with the stationery shops, they were only allowed to sell tobacco products. But she convinces the tobacco guy to sell her the notebook and the way she codes this in her own first diary entry in this black notebook is fascinating. And can I just read a tiny bit?

KIM: Yes, definitely.

JOY: So listen for the sin in the language. So this is the very first line.

I was wrong to buy this notebook. Very wrong. But it's too late now for regrets. The damage is done. I don't even know what impelled me to buy it. Pure chance. I've never thought of keeping a diary. Partly because a diary has to be secret. And so it would have to be hidden from Michele and the children. I don't like hiding things. Besides, there's so little space in our house, it would be impossible to manage. Here's how it happened… 

And then she tells the story of going to the tobacconist, and then, at the end of that story: 

I was alone now in the shop. “I need it,” I said. “I absolutely need it.” I was speaking in a whisper, agitated, ready to insist, plead. So he looked around, then quickly grabbed a notebook and handed it to me across the counter, saying, “Hide it under your coat.” I kept the notebook under my coat all the way home, I was afraid it would slide out. fall on the ground while the porter was telling me something or other about the gas pipes. I felt flushed when I turned the key to open the door to the apartment. I started to sneak off to my room, but I remembered that Michele was still in bed. 

So, the language with which de Céspedes imbues this episode is the language of a secret affair, a secret romance, and it's also the language of political resistance. If you think about resistance to fascism, hiding something under your coat, it's a secret. You look around, say, "Here, quick, take it," right? So both of those discourses are brought to life within the first two pages of this novel. It's just brilliant. And it makes the notebook seem like this very forbidden object, a dangerous object right from the get go.

KIM: Yes, she does it so beautifully. It's like the simplest thing, but there's so much tension fraught within it.

AMY: Yeah, like, super desperate-housewife-vibe, where you're like, what could she possibly need to write? It's so clandestine, you know? Your curiosity is instantly piqued. And like you said, it's forbidden in more ways than one because she wasn't really supposed to have bought it that day.

KIM: Yeah, there's this level of escalating terror associated with the diary's existence. She's just so guilty. It burns wherever she has it hidden in the house. It's almost like The Tell Tale Heart or something like that, where it's just there all the time within her thoughts, whether it's hidden away in a drawer at the bottom of a bag of kitchen rags.

JOY: I think one key to understanding what it represents to her, because she doesn't have, you know, fornication to confess when she buys it, right? Nothing like that or criminal activity. But one key is that writing her own name on the first page, Valeria, is what excites her and what stimulates her. And we can talk more about naming later, but it's this selfhood that thrills her and that the diary stands in for so powerfully and effectively. That's why it's an excellent vehicle for telling the story, because it externalizes her growing sense of self awareness that's interior. She confides her interiority into this object that she then has to hide around the house, and the very fact of its physical substance makes her realize, I don't have any place in this entire apartment that is my own. I don't have a drawer that I can lock, you know, so she hides it in the laundry. She hides it in the kitchen cupboard. She's afraid that her husband or adult children will find it and read it or even just find it and ask her about it. And she realizes \ not only does she not have a space for it, so definitely no “Room of One's Own” in Woolf's terms, but not even like a drawer of one's own. But also she doesn't have time to write in the diary privately. She has no privacy, so if she's just sitting writing, it will cause all kinds of questions in her family that she doesn't want to contend with. So having the physical object of the notebook brings all these things to the surface for de Céspedes.

KIM: Yeah, I love that you mentioned her thinking about writing her name, because we learn early on that everyone in her family, including her husband, calls her Mamma, and it really irritates her on some level. And so much of her identity from their perspective is wrapped up in being a mother, so having the notebook just represents so much of her individuality separate from them, which she really almost isn't allowed to have.

JOY: Exactly. We learn in the novel that her parents have always called her Bebe. They don't call her Valeria, they call her “Baby,” right? And then, yes, her whole family calls her Mamma. And we get this moment when she reveals to the notebook that her husband used to call her Valeria when they were in love, when they were courting. I should say that their marriage is basically a friendly, companionate or roommate marriage. It's basically sexless, although that's not Valeria's desire, and that he started calling her Mamma when his own mother died, which is kind of ick.

KIM: Yeah, yeah.

JOY: And that a portrait, a photographic portrait of her mother in law hangs in their bedroom. 

KIM: Yeah, no wonder they're not having sex. 

AMY: Yeah.

JOY: She's been pushed into that domestic, familial, sexless, caretaking role, and it just doesn't sit well with her at all.

KIM: Yeah. And you had mentioned her age earlier. I think one of us mentioned her age, but everyone's telling her she's old, and she's feeling like this youthfulness inside that's blossoming, but everyone around her is telling her she's old and she's like her mother in law, basically.

AMY: And she's worried that if they do see that she's keeping a notebook, they're going to laugh at her and this idea that she doesn't have anything worthy of writing in their eyes, you know? And talking about this idea of time being a luxury that moms aren't allowed, so therefore the diary is this kind of sinful luxury for her to keep, she touches on so many problems that I think still plague mothers today. I'm just going to mention a few moments. She feels guilty about something as simple as just getting in a little cat nap when you're exhausted. I'm speaking as a mom, a lot of times you feel like you can't do that. She talks about the pressure to single handedly create a perfect Christmas for her family. Also the exhausting logistics and meal prep and the detailed household instructions that she would have to leave if she ever wanted to get away for a weekend, and having just taken a trip to England, I want to bring up a funny moment. A couple days before I was leaving, my husband said to the kids, Oh, maybe mom can make a lasagna and put it in the freezer before she goes. split the difference and I bought two frozen pizzas but I wasn't going to actually make a lasagna while I was packing to go overseas. 

KIM: Yeah, but there's also and I feel like she even admits it to herself, there's almost a martyrdom to it. It's like there's expectations that everyone has on her, but because her identity is only as this wife and mother, it's like if she slows down and has to think about who she is, which is what she ends up doing with the notebook, then chaos is gonna break out. So I feel like some of it is almost self imposed. Am I wrong there?

JOY: One Of my very favorite sections in the book speaks to exactly what you're describing. Sort of the pleasure of martyrdom, which is the only pleasure left to her. Um, and there's this really gorgeous passage that when I was first reading the book, I thought, Okay, this writer knows what she's doing so well. So let me just, um, share this: 

Something keeps me from confessing that I'm writing. [So again, the language of sin and confession.] It's the regret that I spend so much time doing it. I often complain that I have too many things to do, that I'm the family servant, the household slave, that I never have a moment to read a book, for example. That's all true. But in a certain sense, that servitude has also become my strength, the halo of my martyrdom. So on those rare occasions when I happen to take a nap for half an hour before Michele and the children return for dinner, or when I take a walk, gazing in the shop windows on the way home from the office, I never confess it. I'm afraid that if I admitted I had enjoyed even a short rest or some diversion, I would lose the reputation I have of dedicating every second of my time to the family. No one would remember the countless hours I spend in the office or in the kitchen or shopping or mending, but only the brief moments I confessed I had spent reading a book or taking a walk. Michele is always urging me to get some rest, and Ricardo says, [that's her son, her adult son,] that as soon as he's able to earn money, he'll take me on vacation to Capri or the Riviera. Recognizing my weariness, [so verbally recognizing her weariness] frees him of every responsibility. So they often repeat severely, you should rest, as if not resting were a whim of mine. But in practice, as soon as they see me sitting and reading a newspaper, they say, “Mamma, since you have nothing to do, could you mend the lining of my jacket? Could you iron my pants?” And so on. 

And so it goes on and on and then, she talks about how only having a high fever gets her out of constant work, right? The second shift that she pulls after she gets home from her office job at 7 p. m. And she writes: 

I'm always tired and no one believes me. And yet tranquility for me originates precisely in the tiredness I feel when I lie in bed at night. There, so in that tiredness, I find a sort of happiness in which I feel peaceful and fall asleep. I have to recognize that perhaps the determination with which I protect myself from any possibility of rest is the fear of losing this single source of happiness, which is tiredness.

The nuance and delicacy with which she examines her own contradictions is so... it's perfect. 

KIM: Yeah, it's absolutely perfect. And I, even in a very modern marriage, etc. I still totally get that feeling of where like, okay, you have to seriously be down for the count to take a break, you know, I mean, I take many more breaks than Valeria, but, 

AMY: Yeah. I mean, that's a good point. Still see artifacts of what she was going through a little bit, right?

KIM: Yeah, definitely. 

JOY: There's all this advice even today. Oh, if you want your husband to be helpful around the house, (helpful as if it's really your duty) never criticize his housekeeping.

KIM: Yeah, and overpraise, like, when they do things, make a really big deal out of it.

JOY: Exactly.

KIM: So, interestingly enough, in addition to having this life at home, she is also a career woman, and a lot of her friends, maybe all of them, really, aren't career women. So her workplace ends up factoring significantly into this novel. Do you want to talk a little bit about that, Joy?

JOY: Yes, so most of her friends are wealthy women who are supported by their husbands, and we get scenes of that earlier in the book and how she feels a bit divided from them because of that. One of her friends, we should mention, is Clara Poletti, who has split from her husband and is a successful screenwriter. Poletti is more similar to de Céspedes herself, who was also a successful screenwriter in addition to being a novelist, editor, journalist, and so on. And so she's sort of a stand in for de Céspedes on the periphery of this novel. Valeria, our protagonist, does find such deep pleasure in her office work where she's competent, she's respected, and where she is called Valeria, right? So again, that identity is recognized by her boss, uh, who is a wealthy, good looking businessman. And they've worked together for some years, and, uh, the fact that he recognizes her, that he praises her work, that he calls her by her name, that he sees her for who she is and who she wants to be seen as, this gives rise to growing mutual attraction between them, which does become part of the focus of the novel. But again, I would argue that the real affair in this novel, the real danger to Valeria's settled domestic life, is an affair with herself. It's a romance with her own thoughts and feelings, her own desires, her own sensual perceptions of the world, you know. That's what's really blossoming. But she doesn't even really have the language for that, right? It sort of gets externalized onto this handsome, wealthy boss guy who could possibly, you know, change her life in all kinds of exciting ways.

KIM: Yeah, you get the feeling her husband would be more upset about the illicit diary, almost, than the affair. 

JOY: Potentially so. And an interesting sort of sidebar in the novel is that her husband, we learn, she learns, has also been secretly writing.

KIM: Mm hmm.

JOY: Writing a screenplay. And he gives it to Clara Poletti to read, and there's a very strong suggestion throughout quite a lot of the novel that he's actually involved in an affair with Poletti. And this is an interesting aspect as well, that he's drawn to a woman who's successful, independent, a writer, a creative, and his wife is right there in the same apartment with him, uh, and he sees her as Mamma, please mend, you know, whatever, please iron my stuff, please have dinner on the table. He's just incapable of seeing her, whereas her boss is capable of seeing her.

AMY: He reminds me a little bit of the husband in E.M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady in that he's just kind of a dope sometimes, but he's not a villain at all. And I like that she chose not to make him a villainous, jerky husband, because I think it makes her quiet desperation even more potent and you realize it's not about the husband, per se. It's a bigger issue.

JOY: I think that de Céspedes does a great job. Of humanizing all four of the main characters and showing their loneliness, their anguish, their desires that are thwarted by various forces. And so, yes, Michele does not come off as a cackling, controlling villain, uh, just as someone who expects his wife to fulfill certain roles and can't see anything beyond that, right?

KIM: The idea of an unreliable narrator, too, and how it kind of plays into this, because, you know, it's like what you said about him maybe having an affair. She's dropping hints, but she doesn't want to admit even to her own private diary. While she's very honest in a lot of ways, it still feels like, okay, this is a very real person who is unwilling to admit certain things to herself.

JOY: Exactly. There's a sense in which she's unwilling to let herself know what she actually does know. That that would be shattering in some way that she cannot emotionally tolerate. So she turns a blind eye to that. In terms of whether she's a reliable narrator or an unreliable narrator, she's a sincere narrator. There's a kind of ruthless honesty she has with herself about herself. I think she says something like The more I try to be the judge, which is interesting if you think back to that, um, Ginsburg exchange in Mercurio, um, the more I try to be the judge, the more I find myself the criminal, right? So she's interrogating her own motives, and that kind of careful precision of analysis of the small day to day mundane aspects of an ordinary life are what make the novel for me have the texture of psychological reality and the fluidity of the prose where one minute she's starting to think about politics a bit, and then the next minute she's worried about her family and then the next minute she's craving a new pretty hat, you know? That sort of fluctuation reminds me a great deal of the modernists who were trying to capture a stream of consciousness. 

KIM: Right. Right. 

JOY: Yeah.

AMY: So yeah, the relationship in the book that I was most intrigued by, to be perfectly honest, was the relationship between Valeria and her 20 year old daughter Mirella. The mother daughter dynamics are so intense, and I have a 13 year old, so I'm just on the cusp of this changing relationship that, you know, mothers and daughters naturally have, but it was kind of excruciating to read this as a mom to a daughter, and it was also very different. A lot of novels you read about maternal angst, it's mothers of young children, you know, postpartum things like that, but this is so different because Mirella is almost grown. But in that sense, they're able to actually engage with each other on an entirely different level that is almost hostile at times. 

KIM: Yeah, and it's hard because she recognizes that she should say something else, and she wants to, but she'll just say the worst thing to her daughter. You're just like, Oh why couldn't you say the thing you really wanted to say? You could connect, you're both struggling and lonely. You could connect over it, but...

JOY: Yeah, absolutely. To circle back, like, if you think about Kate Chopin and The Awakening and the way that her young children are the source of her anguish, right? But the issue of Mirella, I think that Mirella functions for Valeria as a kind of road not taken, right? Mirella is a vision of what could have been, what might have been, what could still be if Valeria were bold enough to seize the reins of her own life. And so it's insanely irritating to her that right here in her own apartment is her own daughter who's doing the things that she didn't have the courage to do, the wherewithal to do, the encouragement, right. And there's even a passage late in the book where Valeria contemplates her own role as a kind of bridge between her mother's generation and the expectations for womanhood that her mother still presses on her at every opportunity and then her daughter's generation, which has so much more sexual freedom, political freedom, professional freedom, right? 

AMY: There's a part of her that also is trying to champion what Mirella is doing, even though she disapproves of it. You see moments where she's like, Go on girl. Go, go for it. Don't do what I did, you know, sort of thing. So very interesting dynamics.

KIM: Yeah. And she does in some ways want Mirella to move forward, but then other ways she feels like it's very much a betrayal of everything she's put into marriage, that her daughter can go out and do this. It's like she did all the things she was supposed to, and it doesn't feel good to her. And she's almost punishing her daughter for that.

AMY: Yeah. Like I never got that opportunity. I didn't get to do that.

 JOY: Yes, you mentioned America Ferrara earlier, and a filmic text with which many of your listeners will be familiar is, um, her movie Real Women Have Curves. And that same dynamic plays out there, where the mother is envious and bitter. Why should the younger generation enjoy a life that I wanted, but could not have? Yeah.

KIM: Right.

AMY: But some of the moments between Mirella and her mom are so brutal. It's like she knows her mother's wounds, and she jabs it.

JOY: It's a brilliant analysis of mother daughter dynamics. It really is. And something that I want to mention in that regard, is that in the next novel by de Céspedes that is being published in English, now, again by Astra House, um, is called Her Side of the Story. And it also has a mother daughter relationship. So I haven't read it yet, I just got it last night in the mail and I'm so psyched, but there is a mother daughter relationship in which the mother has extra marital longings for someone. And her young daughter is watching this happen. So more Mirella became the protagonist and was watching Valeria and could tell what was happening with Valeria's desire and so on. So it flips the roles. I won't say more because I haven't read it yet, but this is just what I'm gleaning from the afterword by Elena Ferrante. Clearly the mother daughter relationship was one that compelled her tremendously. 

AMY: I also noticed, um, getting back to her boss at work, they're always trying to set up, like, how can we be together? How can we runoff on a rendezvous somewhere? And a phrase that keeps recurring over and over is Valeria saying, It's not possible. And I feel like she's saying something more than just this affair is not possible. Like she's speaking to a bigger issue again. 

JOY: I do think you're right. She's policing her own concept of what's possible for herself. We should talk about, just very quickly, the fact that the very act of keeping a diary changes how she perceives her world because now she's sort of scanning for things to write about. So what, in the course of an ordinary day, is worth memorializing in writing? Then what do you say about it? You're an editor and you're a critic of your own life, and that alchemy is part of what makes the notebook so incendiary, so explosive. She realizes that she's being changed by the very process. 

KIM: Yep.

JOY: That is just very important. And so her repeated utterances, it's not possible, both to her boss and to herself in the journal, are just sort of a way of surveilling herself and maintaining the borders of her life.

AMY: And the larger idea that really writing this notebook is not going to be possible for much longer, you know? I mean, she feels her world is closing in on her. 

KIM: Can you talk a little bit about the publication history of this book? How was it received when it was serialized also, and why do you think she was eventually forgotten?

JOY: Well, she was a best selling novelist in Italy. So it was received extremely well at that time in her country. When it was published in the United States in its first English translation the U. S. by Simon and Schuster in 1958 as The Secret, that was the title of it then, I don't know a lot about how it was received at the time but we know that it was reviewed in The New York Times by Francis Keene who was a translator of Italian literature and romance languages, and she loved it. She just thought it was incredibly brilliant. And so in terms of The New York Times and its influence, you know, it would have been well received here, but I don't know how widespread that was or what the sales figures were like. I don't know that yet. 

AMY: I love the idea that it came out first in the magazine, like you said, for Italian readers. 

KIM: Yeah, totally. It's perfect.

AMY: You feel like it's a real woman almost. Yeah. 

KIM: Yeah. 

JOY: Exactly. And that breathless urgency, what's going to happen next, right, as if this were happening in real time, perhaps not even that far from where you live, right? 

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: And like we talked about, there is this building dread. Was almost like Lord of the Rings, the notebook was like some sort of dark entity in the house that has a power. So by the end of the book, Valeria writes that "all women hide a black notebook," and it's taking me back to this conversation from the essays earlier about this deep well that women fall into and de Céspedes's belief, kind of hopeful belief, actually, that women find important things in that well. 

JOY: Yeah. So the thing that I think is really brilliant about how de Céspedes structures this novel, in that sense, the sense of dread and ominousness and how things are either going to be horrific or they're going to close down; we don't know what's going to happen, and how things the opportunity to vicariously experience rebellion, critique, right? All the things that Valeria is experiencing desire, right? And then to close it up like a notebook and put it away or destroy it entirely. So we have the possibility and then the containment, right? So it's thrilling and revolutionary and incendiary, but then safe. 

AMY: It's making me think, randomly, of that kind of like end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Ark just gets buried on the shelves, but you know all the hidden danger and how powerful it really is, right? 

KIM: Yeah.

JOY: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All that hidden danger. Yeah.

AMY: So that brings me to your own writing, Joy. I want to mention a personal essay that you wrote last year entitled “Burning It Down.” It was recently named a notable essay in the New Best American Essays Collection edited by Vivian Gornick. We're going to share a link to that in our show notes, listeners, so you can read it in full. But it relates to de Céspedes, I think, because you talk about the decision you made to destroy all of your journals that you had kept since the age of 12. Tell us a little bit more about this.

JOY: Absolutely. Yeah. And in my case, I didn't really have scandalous, incendiary material in the journals, but I felt as if I wanted to let go of a calcified sense of identity. I really wanted something new and fresh. So it was really kind of an ontological move, like, I don't want to carry these yards of notebooks around with me anymore, like baggage of who I used to be, all these different iterations. There was something quite fierce and wonderful about letting them go, and as you know, the essay opens with having my hairdresser shear off my long hair, which was dark at the time, and letting it grow in silver. So like lots of letting go or shedding, uh, you know, because I had been coloring my hair. So there's a lot about performing a kind of femininity or youthfulness or whatever. I was just sort of like, nah, I don't want to, you know, I'm ready for change. But as long as I am dragging this boulder of past selves behind me, it's almost as if I feel beholden to the expectation that I'll keep performing who I was, you know? And even if other people haven't read those journals, I know what they say, you know, and I'm tired of them. I'm ready to turn those in and to see what kinds of freedom lie on the other side of that. The field of pure possibility, to go back to that phrase that you noticed, Amy, that Valeria keeps saying: It's not possible. It's not possible. What if one says to oneself, It is possible. And that is possible. And that's possible too. And anything is possible. Then what? Then what do you make of your life? That's a radical kind of freedom, and it's a kind of freedom that I think not only does the world not give women very often, but women don't give ourselves, and so that's what I wanted to do.

KIM: Right. So, we've talked about Valeria's need to keep her innermost thoughts secret. And then we talked about you destroying your own journals. But in your professional writing career, you've done really the opposite, in terms of publishing these incredibly candid essays, like Burning It Down, which I love and I'm so excited it's getting even more recognition because it's wonderful. Not to mention your memoir. 

AMY: Yeah, you took your past and you put it out there, boldly, for everyone to read, which is a hard thing to do. You're basically doing the opposite of what she was trying to do, which was to keep it under wraps.

JOY: But I think there's a tremendous difference. The public version, when one knows it will be public, is highly shaped, not fictionalized, but shaped, edited, chosen. In a different way from the process that Valeria learns about, where you're looking at your life and then choosing what to write for yourself privately to explore things. That's just so vulnerable. Of course I still keep notebooks and journals and so on, but, you know what I think it was? Um, we hired a historian, a Latina historian at my institution, and she came to my apartment. She's like, You know, uh, as a Latina writer, as a professor, there are very few Latinas who are full professors in this country, and she said, You know, people are going to want your notebooks, your archives, one day. And I was like, Whoa, wait a minute. What? You know, because I just thought, you know, uh, I'll get old. I'll destroy them all. So my son won't have to deal with them. And you know, that, that I forget what, um, Scandinavian practice of...

KIM: yeah.

AMY: Oh, right. Preparing for death. Yeah.

JOY: Yeah, but I never thought, Oh my goodness, that stuff could be public. I didn't write it to be public. So I guess it's a little bit about control and intentionality. So when we select things and we say, here's something that I would like to offer the world. Maybe it was harrowing. Maybe it was awful. Maybe I behaved badly. Maybe other people did, but I'm going to analyze it with a kind of precision and then revise it and polish it and give it to the world. That's a really different thing from, you know, I'm 19 and writing in my diary thinking no one will ever see it. So I think I just wanted to preserve a sense of privacy and freedom that kept those two selves very separate and distinct. 

AMY: Interesting. I love that.

KIM: So Joy, thank you so much for introducing us to Alba de Céspedes. Is there anything else you're working on that you'd like to tease for us? Another title in the works? No pressure.

JOY: Thank you. Um, yes, and I would say that. The next novel by de Céspedes will be available in November, like mid November, Her Side of the Story. 

KIM: I can't wait to read it. 

AMY: I know, I'm definitely going to read it. I love that there's something else available for us.

JOY: Yeah, I'm really excited. Myself, I'm working on two things: a collection of short stories about women at pivotal moments who choose the very unexpected. So it definitely ties into what we've just been talking about. And then I'm also editing, with translator Rhi Johnson, a collection for the University Press of Florida of my grandfather's writing. So this really fed into One Brilliant Flame. My grandfather, Feliciano Castro, after whom the character Feliciano in that book is named, he was a poet and a lector, and a printer, in Key West. He published a volume of poetry in 1918 that was included in my father's effects when my father died. And I just thought, you know, maybe all grandpas write books of poetry. And so I've known about this for many years. And, um, then I met Rhi, who's a translator and a scholar of Galician and Cuban literature, and they said, No, wait, these poems are actually pretty cool and important. So we've been working together for quite some time, and now they're going to be in print. So that's also exciting in terms of legacy, you know, and Alba de Céspedes and her relationship with her grandfather. Yeah, so…

AMY: It's really amazing, the connection that, you know, you've discovered with her. It's uncanny. 

JOY: It is uncanny. It's truly amazing and thrilling. So thank you for inviting me to talk about her.

AMY: Well, it's been so great to have you back. Thank you so much.

KIM: Yeah. You can come on anytime. You're great at this.

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