Share

Share

Share on Facebook Share on Facebook Tweet Share on Twitter Share on WhatsApp Share on WhatsApp

SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER

“School was no longer a space in which I had to survive and spend time. That building had become my ocean, and I, almost without realizing it, had stopped kicking and swallowing water. Pen in hand and with a thousand words pouring forth, I had finally learned to swim,” writes Julieta Sverdlick —actress, singer, and writer—in When You Want, You Can Destroy Me (Metropolis, 2024), her debut novel. A life—two—confronted by a challenging reality, which the author addresses with poetic mastery and reveals a love story that banishes the idea of ​​romantic love as a savior. This narrative voice is powerful, its own salvation and no other.

The awakening of love, of sex, between two girls, bodies that meet and then separate; perhaps an unexpected challenge that life urges us to battle. A profound story in Sverdlick's pen that, like the protagonist's pen in When You Want ..., draws her into the deepest waters of the self.

― The title of the book is a statement: “Whenever you want, you can destroy me.”

"It was all a huge undertaking. And at first, the text, which was actually written in the workshop, was filed away in a virtual drawer. At one point, my dad sent me a contest that awarded prizes for projects in progress. It was a chance to rethink this. I met with Karina, my lifelong teacher, and then I also reached out to Luz (Santomauro, her editor). And of those texts, the one that says ' Whenever you want, you can destroy me ' already existed. She liked it as a title. I wasn't entirely convinced. I took the texts to her. She told me she saw two possibilities for this book, and I thought, 'What a book!'" “We were coming to the conclusion that the relationship was the axis, interrupted by these childhood memories that would show how that thing that was falling apart had formed. The first chapter ended up being the collapse. I wondered where destruction comes from, if it's from a positive place to build something else. If destruction comes from a place of throwing away all the shit. There's also something like surrendering to love, opening yourself to the possibility of these things happening, to what extent that's love, to what extent it's not. Trying to redefine that phrase. And it emerged in different chapters, this thing about the protagonist asking herself who's destroying whom.”

 «The things one manages to say to others one does not hear for oneself.«

― Throughout your narrative, you work extensively on two issues that go hand in hand: identity and the body. Identities today are defined by sexuality.

― Sexual identity runs through the book and is the linchpin. The thing about the body was something I added. The two things looked very different twenty years ago than they do now. Having had a chaotic encounter with my sexual identity during adolescence, it forced me to confront and take a stand. Choose which story I wanted to tell myself and which story I wanted to accept as true. Construct my own. I took ownership of that narrative, managed to feel comfortable, and defend it. Although the whole body image thing isn't entirely resolved. It's like a more recent internal and external struggle; it's uncomfortable because it's much less resolved. There are things I can't change in my thinking, although, you see, one is much more benevolent with others than with oneself. The things one manages to say to others, one doesn't hear for oneself . With this theme, I didn't know whether to delve into it or not because I don't know how far I'm ready, or how much I have to say. It ends up being a key line of the character, because it also has to do with discomfort with oneself, how one stands before others, and how that outside affects oneself.

― It's a young adult book. Is it a young adult book?

― As for the editorial category, I think it's great for adolescents. It can be a reflection or a place to identify with, in a process they may be going through or about to go through; but I didn't write it with that in mind. And I think you can read it as an adult and find other things. On the other hand, I don't want to take responsibility, not to avoid responsibility, but to put myself in a very high place. I do know that if I had received a book like this in my adolescence, my life would probably have been different . Because representation makes things different , because as I also tell in the book, I didn't have any kind of role model of girls who were with girls, and until I entered adolescence, I knew it was a possibility .

Writing a book during a pandemic

― You are an actress, singer, fiction writer, can we add playwright? 

― I'm trying to get into playwriting, but I'm still not quite there, just getting my feet wet. My journey with literature began a long time ago. I started writing as a child, inventing stories. I didn't write them down. Nowadays, it's possible, but when I was little, it didn't exist. I used to say, "If I could dictate to a typewriter, I'd have tons of stories written." Later, in high school, I wrote poetry and took a literary workshop for a long time. I was obsessed with the workshop; I went two or three times a week… Beyond that, I always wanted to be an actress, but in my family, intellectual work is highly valued. I studied literature for a year and a half or two, and one day I never went back. I ran away from Puan to take a theater class, dropped out of the workshop, and had a hiatus with literature. It seems that the whole situation of just having to sit down and read led me to not pick up a book for four years. I went elsewhere, started studying music, theater, and went to the School of Contemporary Music. That drive to write was like a tap on my shoulder from time to time. And little by little, I became friends and reconnected with the literature of my life.

― From there to your first book, one step.

― Yes, and right during the pandemic. We were very bored and cooped up. I was in Arkansas, because life is weird. I spent the entire pandemic, a year living in Arkansas. 

― Tell us about that.

― In 2015, I went to New York to study musical theater. At first, I went for eight months, like, to live that experience. I said, well, I'll go the first year to try it out. I was 26. A week after arriving, I said, "I want to live here." I stayed to finish the conservatory for those two years and then what my visa allowed at the time. I wanted to get another one, but it was a hassle. I had to return to Argentina for a couple of years until I reapplied for one, and it was fine. In the middle, I met the woman who is now my wife. After two or three months, I had to leave, no matter what; I didn't have papers. We were in-person girlfriends for three months, and then two and a half years away. Very lesbian stuff and crazy people, really. (Laughs)

I was able to get a visa and return (to the United States) in March 2020. I arrived a week before everything shut down. I had started working, but suddenly I couldn't do anything else. Plus, I had an artist visa that only allowed me to work on theater-related projects, and it was impossible: there was no theater.

― How were those days?

― We were both locked up in a small apartment in New York for fifteen days. One of us was going to die at the hands of the other, I don't know which, but it was going to happen. (Laughs) She said, "Let's go to Arkansas, to my parents' house." I had met them once, as a friend, so I said, "Are you crazy?" Three days later, I was the one who said, "Let's go to Arkansas." It was a salvation to leave, to be in a house with greenery all around. We could go out, walk. There, in a moment of boredom, I started writing again. A little more of that connection that had always been there, present, appearing. And I got hooked. I wasn't trying to write a book. I don't remember who I was talking to. I told her that I always had the feeling that I didn't remember anything from when I was little, I had very few memories. I did an exercise and said, I'm going to try to write my first memory, to see what's behind it. And that was the first thing I wrote, which later ended up in this book.

― It's interesting because, as a theater person, there has to be a very psychoanalytic introspection, a must. 

― My parents… My parents couldn't have done it any other way. They are Lacanian psychoanalysts, yes.

― And this first memory, what was it? 

― Actually, it ended up being a chapter. It talks about what my family was like, going back in time with memories. It was refined and grew throughout the book. I wrote trying to remember and put myself in that little girl's eyes. There's a chapter where I describe when I realized that five minutes were time. Like they contained something. That's how I started writing. I did a remote literary workshop with Karina Macció, also very pandemic-related, a couple of months ago. I brought some of these texts, and they asked me: what happens if this character, this little girl, grows up? What would you write? What moments would you describe? That's when they pushed me to jump. I was in my childhood trying to keep things in order, and that's when they encouraged me to take this character, or me, who knows, and move them in time.

― The narrative voice is very strong. Not only is it in the first person, which is always accompanying, but it also has a lot of poetry. How did you step back and look at the perspective?

― At first, I wasn't very determined. It was this "let's see what happens." And yes, I always felt that voice, a voice that is very much my own. What interested me most in those early memories was conveying that little girl's vision as clearly as possible, describing these sensations, tiny things that were huge to her at that moment. It emerged from there. I talk a lot about the feeling in my stomach; I think I feel things from there. It grew until the crux of the matter: what I wanted to tell. This scene of her coming out came up (an expression I don't like, but I can't find another). What interested me most wasn't necessarily the drama of the coming out or the reactions, but how this little girl who had believed she had to be perfect, or who believed in the moral of not lying, how suddenly something starts to wobble and fall because if I have to lie to see the person I love, is that wrong? What interested me most was that, that same voice and that core of the character's reflection. 

"We have a long fight ahead of us."

― Let's talk about lesbianism.

― When I was a girl, I knew a woman who came to my house with her friend. She was an acquaintance of my parents. This generation of adults around me would say, "So-and-so is coming with her friend." They didn't do it out of malice or homophobia. But what message is left for a girl who, from the very beginning, until she was fourteen or fifteen, was called "friend," but then you realize it wasn't, they were saying "friend" for fourteen years. And why, why do they call each other boyfriend, girlfriend, me, and this is the friend? So there's something that can't be said. And that's a message in itself. I understand that generation was trying to hide, but something felt like it was better left unsaid. That's also a message that one incorporates, without words. And I tried hard in the book to portray that everyone was doing the best they could with what they had, out of love; no one tried to do anything wrong, and in fact, they were transformed. That's it: what isn't named doesn't exist.

― And today?

― Today there's more representation, often by force, even if the parents don't want it, but the child sees it anyway. When Disney puts two mothers in a movie for 30 seconds, everyone jumps in to complain, but Disney has to include it, even though it took a long time to do so, and it's never the main character. Let's wait ten more years. I think the concept of freedom of expression is fragile: "If I don't like it, I can say I don't like it." No, you can't, you can't have an opinion about the rights of others . You can have an opinion about the color of shoes, if you want, but you can't have an opinion about rights; it's not the same thing. Luckily, in many areas these things are being talked about, they're being opened up. But I also got a message from a girl in her twenties, asking me if the book exists in PDF because she can't bring books from the LGBT community into her house. So, we'll have a fight for a while.