Description

‘On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.’

On a single day, Mar Garcia Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal; Garcia Puig’s grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles.

In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, Garcia Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life.

At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, Garcia Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them.

Publisher Review

‘Nothing sentimental creeps into this portrait of motherhood. Garcia Puig writes from within anxiety, grief, obsession, and psychic terror – the states that churn when new life arrives and refuses reassurance. She exposes how women have long been venerated and blamed in the same breath. Leaning into madness as much as clarity, Garcia Puig carries with her the mothers who came before – Hecuba, Medea, Isabella Thackeray, the unnamed women punished for loving too much or too poorly. This is a breathtaking, ferocious book about maternal responsibility.’ Jamieson Webster

‘A wonderful hybrid book, as monumental as it is intimate. Her words resonate simultaneously with our political and poetic sensibility: with The History of the Vertebrate, all of us crazy women understand the reason behind our melancholy, and we start to sing.’ Marta Sanz

‘”Freedom is therapeutic,” someone wrote on the wall of an abandoned madhouse. That inscription is projected onto Mar Garcia Puig’s extraordinarily liberated book, as well conceived as it is executed. A powerful testimony of her experience of puerperal madness. A delirious and sane tapestry that weaves in various directions.’ Enrique Vila-Matas