Las chicas no lloran
After a family cookout, at the leaden siesta hour, a girl and her boyfriend run off to go to a sleazy motel. After sex, they look at the mirror on the ceiling over the bed and see themselves as an old married couple.
A listlessness affects them, the same one that arises passing through a photo album on Facebook. He tells her how his father used to beat him; first like this, then like that, then again the same as before, a mimicry of violence like the mimicry of sex, an ancient, vital choreography that the narrator seems to know from before, irrespective of her youth––from another life, another time, one that will never darken over for her.
In the brave, melancholic vein of Milena Busquets, with the sensual abandon of Miranda July, these stories dissect the brutality and fear of love and the violence of its contradiction: dark passageways, like those of a ghost train filled with mothers, fathers, children.
A wise, uncompromising, and compassionate young woman, sharp and delicate, Olivia Gallo tells what happened yesterday, but from a distance. She pushes the past away, twists it, pulls it, savors it like a bitter candy, lets it move or irritate her, but not to cry. Never to cry.
PRESS
«I love Olivia Gallo’s stories: I think she has a very languid, minimal style, where nothing seems to happen but it does. And in an age of big activists and concepts in capital letters, one appreciates talent with subtlety.» Valerie Miles
«A new storyteller has been born: in these minimalistictales, Olivia Gallo offers a portrait gallery of adolescents moving into young adulthood today. Stories in the first person, inhabited by fragile or disoriented presences in aworld without references, where the first thing you feel isfear and then, as if reflexively, a weakening of tension reflected in the writing itself.» Daniel Gigena, Página 12
«Growing doesn’t just make your knees hurt. It´s a marathon full of slippery and dangerous truths: childhood, adolescence and youth. Olivia builds poetic images that hypnotize,that can be touched and smelled.» Victoria Pérez Zabala, La Nación
«Young but wise, compassionate but incorruptible, delicate as water, Olivia Gallo tells the events of yesterday from a distance. She pushes the past away, twists it, stretches it, savors it like a sour candy, lets herself be moved or irritated, but never to the point of tears. Never that far.» Magalí Etchebarne
