«Las madres no escriben, están escritas»

«Las madres no escriben, están escritas» is an epigraph attributed to Susan Suleiman at the opening of the chapter “La decisión.” Its concise opposition between writing and being written places authorship and motherhood in tension: the mother appears not as the maker of a text but as someone made into one. The chapter’s opening scene gives that formulation a pointed context without resolving it into a simple verdict.

Placement and Meaning

The epigraph comes before the narrator describes the autumn in which motherhood had absorbed her physically and psychologically. She had managed to bring Erik up to the third percentile in weight, the threshold she describes as normal, at the cost of irreversible wear to her nipples. The bodily detail makes the epigraph’s language of being written resonate with the demands motherhood has inscribed on her, while the narrator’s account remains her own act of authorship.

The Chapter’s Opening Reversal

The opening also complicates the epigraph’s stark division. During the narrator’s usual twenty-minute morning nap, a telephone call interrupts her. Expecting a telemarketer, she answers aggressively; instead, a nervous voice says it is calling from the cultural department of Gobierno Vasco to tell her she has received the Euskadi prize. Her startled response follows the news. The juxtaposition sets the absorbing labor of motherhood beside public recognition of the narrator as a writer, leaving the tension between being written and writing active rather than settled.