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Primera Persona

Primera Persona Indoors

A day of live autobiography

Festivals

Free

It’s springtime, and very soon we should have been starting to celebrate the ninth outing of the Primera Persona festival. This year, we’ll have to wait to enjoy a new round of life stories at the CCCB. In the meantime, to whet your appetite, we’ve prepared a very special session that we’ll be broadcasting on the internet, a "Primera Persona Indoors" with two outstanding guests: New Yorker journalist Jia Tolentino, in conversation with the journalist Noelia Ramírez about privacy, exposure and internet, and writer and novelist Rachel Cusk, who’ll be talking about marital and sentimental ruins with the journalist Anna Guitart.

Before the conversation between Jia Tolentino and Noelia Ramírez, the directors of the festival, Kiko Amat and Miqui Otero, will present this special edition and announce the dates of the ninth festival.

18.00 “Autopsy of a marriage” with Rachel Cusk and Anna Guitart

In 2009, the marriage of writer and novelist Rachel Cusk ended and her world broke apart “like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces”. Cusk, one of the most original and acclaimed voices of present-day literature, wrote about the experience in her memoir Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation (2012). Published in 2020 in Spanish with the title Despojos (Libros del Asteroide) and in Catalan with the title Seqüela (Les Hores), the book is the story of an author and mother of two daughters who observes her own reactions to the destruction of life as she had hitherto seen it. Cusk will be taking part in “Primera Persona Indoors” to explain, on the basis of her experience, the impact of divorce on women’s lives, and the controversial reactions of those around her and in the media that she has turned into literary matter.

18.55 “Me on the internet” with Jia Tolentino and Noelia Ramírez

New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino started to talk about her life in a blog when she was little, took part in a reality show as an adolescent, and, just after turning 30, her first book featured on Barack Obama’s list of favourite reads. Today she is a unique voice on the conflicts, contradictions and changes that define our times. Author of the acclaimed collection of essays Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion (Penguin Random House, 2019) about the difficulty of seeing ourselves clearly in these times, so given to a culture that revolves around me-me-me, at “Primera Persona Indoors” Tolentino will be talking about how, thanks to gender and class debates, to construct that “I” in the often tricky and sometimes toxic net. 

Participants: Rachel Cusk, Jia Tolentino, Anna Guitart, Noelia Ramírez

Directors: Kiko Amat, Miqui Otero

This activity is part of Primera Persona

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Jia Tolentino

Me on the internet

New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino started to talk about her life in a blog when she was little, took part in a reality show as an adolescent, and, just after turning 30, her first book featured on Barack Obama’s list of favourite reads. Today she is a unique voice on ...

Watch the video

Rachel Cusk

Autopsy of a marriage

In 2009, the marriage of writer and novelist Rachel Cusk ended and her world broke apart “like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces”. Cusk, one of the most original and acclaimed voices of present-day literature, wrote about the experience in her memoir Aftermath: ...

Watch the video

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