Montage and Narrative Mode in Spanish Women’s Life Writing

In recent autobiographical experiments by Spanish women authors, montage cuts through façades of cohesion that obscure the power dynamics behind writing lives. Rosa Montero’s La ridícula idea de no volver a verte (2013) and Cristina Fallarás’s Honrarás a tu padre y a tu madre (2018) shatter singular modes of storytelling as they entwine disparate histories in the same textual space. Montero’s auto/biographical account relates the life of Marie Curie to her own life and loss and to the wider effacement of women in socio-historical narratives, while Fallarás’s faction draws into dialogue the incompatible halves of her family history, victors and vanquished of the Civil War. Ostensibly very different, the texts enmesh narrative modes, styles and a hotchpotch of sources – written and visual – to similarly disconcerting effect. Through the gaps between their mismatched pieces, these montages expose the ever-partial composition of the collective histories that Montero and Fallarás seek to unpick.