So It Goes

A searching, buoyant novel about queer love, mothers and daughters, and making a life in the face of the only constant: loss.

Every story is a love story. In a Barcelona redolent with Almodóvar vibes, the love is between women: overlapping and messy attachments between friends, young lovers, mothers and daughters. As Sara’s mother dies, her daughter is in bed with a new obsession. She’s wracked with guilt, but the persistence of need, the demands of the body, refuse to take a dignified pause for the observance of another body leaving this world. If one of the projects of growing up is being defeated by the limits of control we have over ourselves and others, the frustration of trying and failing to be understood, then Sara’s loss, her lovers, and her longterm girlfriend are her passage from 28 and casting about to a little bit older and a little bit more sorted out. If love is ＂more like a quagmire than anything else--sometimes sombre, sometimes blinded by light,＂ then X Is Where I Am is one young woman’s fractious, hopeful, attempt to give in to it.

Sara Torres is a poet and novelist born in Gijón in 1991. Her novel Lo Que Hay (So it Goes )__ received the Javier Morote Award for best new author in 2022. She studied Spanish Language and Literature at the University of Oviedo before completing a master’s degree at King’s College London specializing in theories of textuality, psychoanalysis, queer studies, and feminism, followed by a PhD at Queen Mary University of London. Her first book of poems, La Otra Genealogía, won the national poetry award Gloria Fuertes. She has also published the poetry collections Conjuros y Cantos, Phantasmagoria, El Ritual Del Baño and most recently Deseo De Perro . She writes regularly for eldiario.es . Her second novel La Seducción was published in April 2024. This is her first book to appear in English.

Maureen Shaughnessy is a writer and translator from Spanish. Her published translations include works by Belén López Peiró, Sara Gallardo, Hebe Uhart, and Nurit Kasztelan. Her translations have been featured in The Paris Review, Brick, World Literature Today, LALT, AGNI, WWB and Asymptote . In 2023, her translation of López Peiró’s Why Did You Come Back Every Summer received an English PEN Translates Award. Raised in Oregon, she now lives in Bariloche, Argentina.