Two women – one based on a real person, one imagined – are at the centre of Lucía Lijtmaer’s Cautery, a savage look at the cheap consolations of meme-ified faux feminism.
The novel follows a young woman whose life looks good from the outside, but who feels intensely unhappy and trapped in her relationship. Four hundred years earlier, another woman flees England for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she finds her fortune but discovers independence doesn’t mean freedom from the dangerous vanities of men.
Lijtmaer is a writer and cultural critic, and the curator of the festival of guerrilla and feminist culture, Princesses and Darth Vaders. She codirects, with Isa Calderón, the award-winning podcast Deforme Semanal on Radio Primavera Sound. in conversation with the writer Emma Jane Unsworth.
