Las nerviosas

A journalist in her thirties moves from the cones —the working-class neighborhoods of Lima— but never quite feels comfortable in her middle-class apartment, nor living with her boyfriend, nor with anything at all. The sadness that overwhelms her is neither new nor unique to her. She recognizes it in the bouts of melancholy that her mother, a former domestic worker, has always carried; and in her aunts and grandmothers, as if the sorrow traveled from generation to generation. The women in her family are "nervous," though they have never been diagnosed with depression, perhaps because, according to a deeply ingrained prejudice, domestic workers don't suffer from these "illnesses of the soul", in fact, they don't even have souls. The narrator of this book will embark on a journey, along with her mother, to the coastal town from which she migrated to clean other people's houses. To that place frozen in time between the salt and the distant smell of oil, where the family lost something long ago: an opaque, seemingly irretrievable memory, poised to reveal itself.