Furia
Furia
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Yamile Saied Méndez on Furia
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Homesick in Utah, dreaming of RosarioThe first draft of the novel began during a years-long stretch when Méndez had not returned to Argentina. The longing that accumulated in that absence gave Camila, the protagonist, her raw material: not an invented girl but a composite assembled from real women Méndez had watched, stood beside, and grown up near.
When I started writing the first draft of FURIA I hadn’t been home for many years and I was deeply homesick. Camila was the fruit of all my daydreaming, and came to me fully formed. Made up of memories of my young self and so many girls and women I’d met in my barrio, the bus stop, watching from the sidelines of a soccer pitch, and playing in the vacant lot behind my building.
The sidelines were not a metaphor. In Rosario, the cultural prohibition on girls playing fútbol was so thoroughly enforced that Méndez grew up knowing it as a simple fact of her world, not a personal grievance against her parents.
As a child, I wasn’t allowed [to play soccer], not because my parents were horrible people, [but] because of the stigma.
That stigma gave the book its central conflict: Camila plays in secret, disguised, because the sport she loves most is the one her world has decided is not hers to love.
Two pieces of writing advice had collapsed into the same answer for Méndez, and the collision made the subject unavoidable. She recorded this realization for Hachette Library shortly before publication.
What I had in my heart and what I knew a lot about were the same thing. It was Rosario, my city. [paraphrased from audio]
A specific killing from her school years in Rosario made the book’s feminist content something she could not choose to leave out. The Ni Una Menos movement, which protested femicide across Argentina and Latin America, gave that memory a name and a framework, but the memory itself predated the movement by decades.
Every time I open [an Argentine] newspaper there’s at least one new name. When I was in school in the ‘90s, there was one girl, María Soledad [Morales], that marked my generation. She was the first big name that we knew. She had been killed just for being a girl.
How she wrote it
Twelve years, a NaNoWriMo draft, and an editor who pushed harderThe book’s emotional center shifted completely between the first draft and the version that sold. Méndez began the project believing she was writing a father-daughter story; only deep in revision did the actual spine of the novel reveal itself.
At the beginning, I thought I was writing primarily about a journey with her dad but it was really about the relationship she had with her mom.
That reorientation meant Méndez had to rebuild what the novel was asking: not how Camila escapes her violent father, but how she understands and breaks free from the cycle her mother has lived inside.
The march scene, in which girls protest the disappearance of a teammate’s sister, required Méndez to go somewhere she had deliberately avoided. Her editor read the first attempt and asked for more, and Méndez had to decide whether to follow.
When I wrote the first draft of that scene, my editor said that she loved it but she knew that I could go deeper. It’s a dark place and I didn’t know if I wanted to go there, but I wanted to take my readers and help them experience what it’s like to be in the midst of a march like that.
The Spanish in the novel was not incidental decoration. Méndez made a revision-by-revision effort to keep the language from becoming a spectacle for non-Argentine readers, aiming instead for something closer to transparency, where culture and idiom sit inside the story rather than on top of it.
I made a point of adding things that were untranslatable. That was a conscious act in the revisions... I wanted the book to be a mirror or a window glass, to have the language and culture be as transparent as possible.
The manuscript reached readers only after years of being told the market did not want it. Méndez has been direct about the gap between editorial praise for the writing and the commercial resistance to a story set in Argentina with a Latina protagonist at its center.
Writing it wasn’t challenging. Publishing it was a different story. In the early days of my career, I was complimented over and over on the writing and the story itself, but I was told repeatedly that there wasn’t a market for a story like FURIA.
What she wants us to sit with
Fury as a tool, not a tantrumThe title word carries a specific argument that Méndez returns to across interviews. She draws a line between the passive goodness girls are socialized to perform and the active, disruptive energy required to actually change a life or break a pattern that has held for generations.
Sometimes girls are told to be nice and follow all the rules, but if you are really going to break the chains of intergenerational trauma or abuse, or go out and live your dreams, or even find the love of your life—that can be a revolutionary concept when you have lived in this society for generations—when you put all of that together, you can’t just be the nice girl that you were taught.
Méndez wrote the book first for herself, and then for a specific reader she could picture clearly: a teenager growing up inside constraints she cannot yet name. The intended audience she describes to CBC Books is broader than a single demographic, defined not by nationality or gender but by the experience of being stopped.
I wrote it for all the young people who have great dreams and talents, but society keeps stopping them because of outdated ideas of what is attainable because of their gender, social status, or skin color.