Abortion rights activists in particular, emphasize the importance of having the right to control our bodies. Amnesty International’s campaign My Body My Rights, supports rights to choices on sexuality and reproduction, access to abortion, access to sexual and reproductive health services and freedom from discrimination and violence. Leky’s coming-of-age novel, told in three sections set a decade apart, is populated by oddball characters with outlandish superstitions and peculiar verbal tics – “people who have been fitted into this world askew”, she says. Her taste for eccentrics was fashioned by her upbringing: her father is a psychoanalyst, her mother a psychotherapist, and while her parents weren’t allowed to talk about their patients in public, they discussed cases in bed at night. “I stood behind their bedroom door and listened,” Leky recalls. CP: Sometimes I’m asked if my latest book, Cathedrals, reflects these changes in the law. And I have to explain that, ever since Elena Knows, these themes have been present in my work. Themes of the woman and her place in the world; of the roles assigned from the traditional places and discomfort with those assigned roles. In All Yours, which was my first book, the issue of abortion appears. A teenage girl considers having an abortion and decides not to go through with it. Just because it’s legal and a person can have an abortion safely doesn’t mean that every person (or every literary character) will choose to do it. But, yes, they can consider it, and, in this case, it’s a teenage girl who has to consider doing it clandestinely. In Thursday Night Widows, there’s the issue of domestic violence. In Elena Knows, the issue of abortion again. It’s one of my obsessions. These themes don’t appear in everything I’ve written, but they’re issues that repeat themselves, just as themes repeat themselves in other writers’ works. Other themes that I often return to are the idea of being caged in, hypocrisy, concern with what other people will say. But certainly, the place that women occupy and the roles that pigeonhole them into certain positions—these themes appear in almost all my books. But they present themselves to me on an unconscious level. I don’t know why these specific elements appeared in that setting with this woman who I saw sitting in her kitchen waiting for her Parkinson’s medication to take effect so she could stand up, so that she could get up and walk. Yes, she had a daughter. And that daughter didn’t want to have children, but she also had a very brutal opinion about abortion and the obligation other women have to be mothers. Still, I didn’t consciously think of this book in those terms. It’s like when you dream. You dream, and you can start to pull a thread and say to yourself, “OK, I dreamed this because of this; I dreamed about this person because I ran into them on the street, but I switched what happened to them with what happened to another person.” You mix everything up in dreams. In that initial stage of the creative process, I think there’s something similar. For me it was this woman in her kitchen, waiting for a pill to let her move, to begin to function, because she had Parkinson’s. I do want to live, you know? In spite of this body, in spite of my dead daughter, Elena says, crying, I still choose to live, is that arrogance? Not long ago I was told I was arrogant. Don’t keep the names other people give you, Elena.

this woman who rang her doorbell to call in a twenty-year-old debt that she hasn’t forgotten. Isabel hasn’t forgotten the debt either, but she remembers things differently.” chapter 2, section III.But there’s a problem. Elena’s body doesn’t work. She has advanced Parkinson’s disease, and her daily life is structured around the pills she takes to make tasks as simple as standing and walking possible (if still difficult). She has to find a body that can work for her in her place, and she knows just the person: a woman named Isabel who owes Rita a debt of gratitude. So, shuffling, drooling, hunched perpendicular to the ground, viewing the world out of the corner of her eye, Elena makes the journey by foot, train, and taxi across Greater Buenos Aires to the house where she hopes Isabel still lives. She plans to call in that debt incurred by Isabel when Rita found her vomiting outside of an abortion clinic and saved her from making what Elena knows would’ve been the biggest mistake of her life. But when Elena finally arrives at the house where Isabel still lives, she will be forced to question everything she thinks she knows. People like your daughter, who didn’t even know me, your daughter who didn’t have the nerve to become a mother herself but who treated my body as if it were hers to use, just like you, today, you didn’t come here to settle a debt but to commit the same crime all over again twenty years later. You came here to use my body.” chapter 2, section III. Now that the one-child policy has been relaxed, the stories of these illegal children will soon be a part of China’s national collective memory. But to those who grew up tainted with this humiliation, the scars are permanent. One is Chinese writer Shen Yang, who wrote her story in part to extinguish the nightmares that still haunt her. One of the most powerful quotes to me that expressed this treatment of someone else’s body was when Isabel says to Elena,

Have I ever —? Actually, have you ever been deeply affected – physically – by a novel, to the point of mentally associating it with a very bodily feeling? Because – truth be told – I finished reading this novel many days ago, and the very thought of it is still very instantly-instinctively and automatically supplanted by a weighty, anxiety-ridden feeling seemingly integrated in my body. As if my own body has assimilated the awful, stressful, and painful awareness of its hypothetical – or impending – dysfunctionality. Kudos to Piñeiro – because I had never actually envisaged the factual possibility of this ever happening through the act of reading. How does the current Russian government’s response compare? “In 1939, with the help of the NKVD, the epidemic was avoided. In 2020, it failed,” she says. “But we do not know which is more dangerous for humankind: the plague or the secret police.” Matthew JanneyWhat do you think? When do you want a diagnosis kept private? When do you want others to know? Have you been treated differently or treated someone else differently after you have learned about a diagnosis?