(Note: This interview was originally conducted in Spanish and translated by Leslie Jones.
Lea aquí la versión en español.)

Claudia Piñeiro is an Argentinian author and scriptwriter.

One of her best-known books is Las Viudas de los Jueves (2005, published in English as Thursday Night Widows, 2009), which was made into a film in 2009 and a Netflix series in 2023. In 2005 the book received the Clarin-Alfaguara Prize for Best Novel, and José Saramago, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was part of the selection panel.

Her novel Elena Sabe (2007, translated into English as Elena Knows, 2021) received the German LiBeraturpreis and was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Las grietas de Jara (2009, translated as A Crack in the Wall, 2013) won the 2010 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. Her latest novel to be translated into English is Una suerte pequeña (2015, translated as A Little Luck, 2023).

Claudia is best known for her crime fiction, and many of her books have been made into films. She is the third most translated Argentinian writer.

Claudia is also a scriptwriter for television and cinema. She has also written plays for the theatre, and children’s books. She was involved in the movement to legalize abortion in Argentina.

Talking About Books interviewed Claudia on her novels, the importance of identity, and social commentary.

TAB: In A Little Luck, Marilé returns to Argentina, to Temperley, a place she fled 20 years ago. But she is coming back as another person with a new identity, hoping that no one from her past will recognize her. The issue of identity comes up frequently in the book. How important is it to you and to your writing?

CP: I believe that identity is a crucial value in our lives. To know who we are, where we come from. And also who we want to become and where we want to go. It isn’t a question of accepting who others say we need to be, but to find our own and true answer about ourselves.

In my country’s history, the value of identity was heavily tainted during the military dictatorship, when women were illegally imprisoned, and those pregnant were obliged to give birth, and had their babies taken away from them. Later, many of these women were murdered. The babies grew up in families who knew the truth, but in most cases hid the children’s true origins. Thanks to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, hundreds of the children’s identities were restored, but there are still grandchildren who are missing.

TAB: You start A Little Luck with the beginning of a scene, which recurs throughout the book, each time with a bit more detail. The scene is central to the plot, and revealing what happens little by little adds so much to the book. What led you to use this device?

CP: I used that device because I think it replicates the way memory works: one day a memory that wasn’t there before comes into our mind, and it slowly transforms from an impression to a clear image. This happens especially when it is something we don’t want to remember or can’t, due to trauma. We repress it, until one day it pops up and we can’t contain it any longer. From a writer’s point of view, this device helps to heighten the suspense.

TAB: In your novel Elena Knows, you write from the point of view of a woman with advanced Parkinson’s. Because the reader is in her head, they can feel vividly what she goes through. How were you able to describe this in so much detail?

CP: My mother suffered from the disease with the same characteristics as Elena’s (Parkinson’s Plus). That is why I knew that sick body so well, beyond any sort of research I could have done. In all the material I read, the day-to-day details were missing, things I knew, having shared my mother’s last years with her sick body. Of course, all that I wrote is fiction, but the body is real and it’s my Mum’s. I also felt that as she got sicker, people avoided looking at her, as Susan Sontag writes in her book Illness as Metaphor; we stop looking at people who are sick, making the excuse of not wanting to make them feel uncomfortable. And when we stop looking at them, we hurt them in another way. That is why the novel is written as if it were an extreme close-up of Elena’s body.

TAB: On one level, Elena Knows is a crime novel. But it is also a novel about the position of women in society. What inspired you to write it?

CP: I don’t really think it’s a crime novel, but that it takes elements of that genre to tell Elena’s story, about her life, her body, social issues, issues about women and public health. I think that a crime novel reader finds out very quickly what happened, but continues to read to accompany Elena on her path to also be able to find the truth. The novel was born from the need to speak about my mother’s disease.

TAB: Has your work on abortion rights influenced the plot of Elena Knows?

CP: No, as I wrote it many years before the debate on the subject came up in Argentina. Elena Knows was published in 2007 and the debate started in 2018. Until that point, the word abortion was socially forbidden in Argentina, and people used euphemisms. The law for the voluntary interruption of pregnancy was voted in 2020. So the novel was a forerunner on the subject, and although there were other novels that covered abortion, such as January by Sara Gallardo, the issue wasn’t on the public agenda. Of course, it is an issue I’m interested in since then and even earlier, but my participation as an activist was clearer from 2018.

TAB: You are known for your crime novels, but Elena Knows and A Little Luck feel more political, and are a strong commentary on the hypocrisy of society in particular. Would this be a fair comment?

CP: Crime novels, historically and all over the world, have been one of the most effective literary tools to write about social issues, to reflect society. I’m interested in writing about the society in which I live, its singularities, its dark sides. In both of the novels you mentioned, the story can be told without using that genre or using it in a more nuanced way. But my priority is to write about this society, not its criminal side. However, a country can also be described through the crimes that are committed there.

TAB: What inspired you to start writing?

CP: I have written since I learnt to write, since I was very young. Later came reading and studying in order to write well. But I understand that the need to write is ontological, it came in my DNA. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I didn’t write. As we mentioned in the first question, it is a question of identity, something I became aware of with time.

TAB: Thank you for your insight. I enjoyed both your books very much and look forward to discovering more of your writing.

Read my reviews of Elena Knows and A Little Luck.