Fernanda Trías: On pushing your characters off a cliff

In her latest book, “Pink Slime”, the Uruguayan author Fernanda Trías foresaw that a global pandemic would change the world. Building on a mix of nightmares, a concern for climate change and intuition, she constructed a claustrophobic reality for her characters to test themselves in.

Only by pushing her characters to extremes, she explains, do they reveal their own personalities and motives. Only then do we learn about theirs fears, values and dreams. An intuitive writer like herself can spend a whole novel trying to understand why her narrator stays in the epidemic city that everybody else is fleeing from.

In both “Pink Slime” and her first novel “The Rooftop” from 2001, she explores the interconnectedness of fear and love, which sometimes leads to us doing destructive things in the name of love. I ask why these "ugly feelings" continues to appeal to her.

From here, we to talk about the relationship between mothers and children; why both writing and reading literature is always a political act; and how is was for her to be a female writer from Uruguay slowly entering the international literature scene.