When an Author Explains Her Own Work

Here’s what I said 3 years ago about the novel Tuya (All Yours) by the Argentinean writer Claudia Piñeiro:

Tuya is a parody of the “resufrida mujer latina” or “the long-suffering Latin American woman” trope but I can just imagine some dour, humorless academic taking it completely seriously and providing a “feminist reading” of the novel. God, I hope the colleague who bought Piñeiro’s books isn’t planning to do that or isn’t reading this post.

Book Notes: Claudia Piñeiro’s Tuya

All Yours is an excellent novel. It’s about the wife of a perennially cheating husband but she’s such an insufferable, self-aggrandizing victim that it’s impossible to feel bad for her. A very funny novel, hugely entertaining but guess what? No dour harpy needed to explain the novel from a tediously politicized point of view. Piñeiro did that herself.

In the recently released sequel to All Yours, titled The Time of the Flies, Piñeiro explains how we are supposed to perceive All Yours, providing an actual bibliography consisting of books by Rebecca Solnit (the creator of mansplaining) and similar characters. There’s even a screed on “transwomen are also women or even better women than the primitive basic women because their womaning is so much more womanly.” And slogans about the importance of “inclusive language.” And other similarly aggravating stuff.

Of course, it was obvious this entire time that Piñeiro is very left-wing. She’s Argentinean, so what else can she be? But she’s talented. How could it possibly occur to her to quote the cognitively unwell Solnit or provide explanations of her own writing? Both things are beyond tacky.

I plan to still try to finish the novel but I’m majorly discouraged. Maybe I can simply skip the woke indoctrination chapters, even though skipping anything is almost physically painful to a literary critic.

All Yours is still very recommended, though. It’s very funny even though it’s become clear that the author didn’t mean it to be.