Tender Is the Flesh
Tender Is the Flesh
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Agustina Bazterrica on Tender Is the Flesh
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A Buenos Aires butcher’s window and everything behind itThe novel’s first image arrived on a Buenos Aires street after Bazterrica stopped eating meat, a change partly driven by her brother, who runs an organic restaurant in the city and had been researching food and health. What had once been an ordinary shop window became something she could no longer unsee.
To me, a steak is now a piece of a corpse. One day I was walking by a butcher’s shop and all I saw were bodies of animals hanging down and I thought, ‘Why can’t those be human corpses? After all we are animals, we are flesh.’ And that’s how the idea for the novel emerged.
The slaughterhouse premise, once she had it, became a vehicle for a conviction she had carried long before she stopped eating meat. The novel gave that conviction a structure, but it did not produce it.
I have always believed that in our capitalist, consumerist society, we devour each other. We phagocyte each other in many ways and in varying degrees: human trafficking, war, precarious work, modern slavery, poverty, gender violence are just a few examples of extreme violence.
The Argentine context sharpened this further. In the same interview she named a specific statistic: one femicide every eighteen hours. For her, the violence the novel depicts was not a thought experiment but a description of conditions already normalized around her.
The question she kept returning to, in interviews years after the novel’s publication, was not really about food. It sits underneath every scene in the book and explains why she built the story around a slaughterhouse rather than around any other institution of controlled death.
I was not so much interested in what happens with cannibalism as in what happens when you decide that another human being is not a human being. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Six months of research, five erotic books, and one word she chose not to writeBefore she wrote a word of fiction, Bazterrica spent six months on research: cannibalism, animal rights, slaughterhouse operations, machinery instruction manuals downloaded from the web, institutional slaughterhouse videos. The research broke her before the writing did.
It’s worse than the worst horror movie. I cried, I had nausea, I despaired. I saw many terrifying images: when they remove the beaks from chickens so that they don’t peck each other in overcrowded cages, when they flay the skin from wild animals while they’re alive (because it works better), when the pigs scream because they know that they are going to be killed.
Language was a structural problem she solved before settling into daily writing. The novel required a new vocabulary for a world that had bureaucratized human consumption, but she was equally focused on what to leave out. Naming and silence were two sides of the same decision.
That is why in Tender is the Flesh I tried to work carefully with language. Creating a new matrix requires new words, new ways of naming new things, like when they call a human that is bred for consumption a ‘product’. But I also worked with silence, with the unwritten word, which is another form of cannibalism because by not saying certain things we become complicit, we help build and perpetuate that reality.
Her commitment to individual word choices was not figurative. She tells one story in particular to illustrate how seriously a single decision can cost: the novel has a three-page sex scene, and she read five erotic books before writing it, working through how Spanish handles one specific anatomical term. She got her answer by elimination.
I read these five books only to get to the conclusion that I won’t write the word. [paraphrased from audio]
She did not set out to write within a recognized genre. The word ‘dystopia’ came from outside, applied to the finished work after it won the Premio Clarín Novela, one of the most significant literary prizes in Latin America. She was discovering what she had written at the same moment readers were.
I didn’t read or re-read dystopian fiction because at the time of writing I didn’t think I was writing a dystopian novel.
On what’s at stake
Capitalism, cannibalism, and the machinery of normalizationBazterrica has pressed beyond the novel’s slaughterhouse surface in almost every interview, toward the economic logic she sees sustaining it. She did not frame the book as a horror novel or a provocation; she named it, plainly, as an analysis.
Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty.
That analysis is personal as much as political. Bazterrica has described her own position as a writer in Argentina, a country with ongoing femicide, precarious labor, and a long history of state violence, as a position inside the machinery she is describing.
I write with my burned body about capitalism, about patriarchy.
The mechanism she is most interested in is not cruelty as an aberration but cruelty as a process of categorization. She spelled out how that process works, and why it is not confined to the novel’s imagined world.
Objectivising and depersonalising others allows us to remove them from the category of human being (our equal) and place them in the category of a mere ‘other’, whom we can be violent to, kill, discriminate against, hurt, etc.
What she wants us to sit with
Questions over answers, and a different way of seeingBazterrica has consistently resisted the reading that the novel is advocacy. She drew a line between literature that argues and literature that asks, and placed the novel firmly on one side of it.
With Tender is the Flesh I never intended to write a vegan manifesto. I tried to write the best novel I could possibly write, without trying to convince anyone of anything because, in my opinion, fanaticism is another form of violence.
When readers told her the book had made them stop eating meat, she did not treat that as the measure of success. The dietary change was, for her, a symptom of something more important than itself.
I don’t care if they stop eating meat for one day, one week or several years, it’s not the important thing. The important thing is that they start looking at reality in a different way.
Since 2018 she has taken the novel into close to 100 Argentine schools, talking with teenagers about capitalism and how societies normalize violence. That’s not a book tour; it’s a sustained argument about what fiction is for.
Her definition of what literature can do at its best, offered in a CrimeReads interview, is also a description of the experience she wanted this book to produce: not instruction, but expansion.
I love literature that makes an impact and generates a response, but does not tell me what to do. In my own writing I want to generate questions.