Memoir: Quenching The Thirst By Isidra Mencos

My introduction to writing memoir was random. I had read some memoirs and I liked them, but I’d always focused on writing fiction or academic essays. “Always” is an exaggeration. My commitment to writing was flimsy. I’d write in spurts, get a project done, and then spend years without scribbling even a note in a journal. 

This fickleness was a thorn in my side that robbed me of joy. I had excuses. I worked a demanding corporate job managing teams in several countries, I suffered through a long daily commute, I was raising a young child, and, as a well-trained Spanish woman of a certain era, I did most of the housework. I felt exhausted. Still, a low grade depression, which at times dipped into darker territory, played the soundtrack of my life.

In 2015, desperate to grasp at the remnants of my lifelong dream of being a writer, I enrolled in a one-day workshop about Zen and Writing. I liked the teacher and, buoyed by the outpouring of words that came out of that session, I enrolled in an online writing class he was launching the week after. It happened to be a memoir class. 

At the beginning I thought: “This will be a piece of cake. I already have the plot and the characters!” How wrong I was. I soon discovered that writing memoir was as difficult as writing fiction—perhaps more excruciating. Aside from having to master the craft of writing itself, you had to face the gaps in your memory, the constant editing of aspects of your life that didn’t adhere to the main theme, and worst of all, the fear of revealing so much about yourself, and the panic of angering your loved ones.

I still fell hopelessly in love with the genre. I had always wondered why I had spent my twenties destroying myself via too much alcohol and too many men that treated me carelessly. I suspected it had a lot to do with the unique historical period I lived through. I believed that my story was the story of a generation who had experienced a change so enormous and sudden that, as much as it thrilled us, it also befuddled us.

I grew up under the Francoist dictatorship, which was closely allied with the Catholic church. The repression went beyond politics. It affected every area of our lives. Not only political parties were forbidden, but also languages other than Spanish (Spain has four official languages today); sex was for marriage, and even then intended only for procreation (you could be fined or go to jail for mild public sexual behavior, such as French kissing); women were not allowed to open a bank account or work without their husband’s written permission; divorce, abortion, and homosexuality were illegal; regional diversity was squashed in favor of a monolithic central culture imposed by Madrid, the capital; and the list goes on.

I was 17 in 1975 when Franco died, and Spain transitioned to democracy. The political journey lasted a few years, but the cultural change took us by storm. All of a sudden, magazine covers were full of tits and butts, and the youth went from Catholic purity to free love and partying in a nanosecond. Some drowned in that brusque pendulum swing from thorough oppression to extreme liberalism. An epidemic of heroin and AIDS—and robberies to feed the addictions—ensued. A few of my friends got hooked, died of AIDS or committed suicide.

I didn’t go to such extremes, but I took to the hedonistic ambience with a passion. The trauma of sexual repression and misogynism, though, had left a deep mark. It took me years to overcome its shadow and reclaim my whole self.

In writing about my life, I wanted to show the interplay of history and story. We are in many ways our context. Understanding its influence is key to understanding ourselves, but it’s also crucial for cultivating compassion. Often times the mistakes we make are directly related to the place and the time we grew up in and how they impacted our beliefs and behavior. 

I embarked on writing about my journey from repression to liberation in tandem with Spain’s journey from dictatorship to democracy. One of the hardest craft riddles I needed to solve was how to integrate the historical context without transforming the book into historical nonfiction. I wanted it to read like a novel, not a historical novel. This meant doing a lot of research for accuracy and using only a tenth of it, like the tip of an iceberg, and only from a lived perspective. For example, in talking about the effervescent political discourse right before and after Franco’s death, I framed it within my attendance to demonstrations for democracy, or my parents changing the church we attended for Sunday mass to one run by a liberal friar order. 

I chose to end my memoir in 1992, the year that I emigrated to the United States to earn a PhD at UC Berkeley. It was a perfect bookend, because many people consider that Spain finally achieved the status of a fully modern country integrated to the rest of Europe that year, when we hosted the Olympic Games in Barcelona, the Universal Exhibition in Seville, and Madrid was named European Capital of Culture. 

I wrote Promenade of Desire because I could not avoid it. The thirst for understanding myself and my country could only be satiated through this book. Will I feel the same urge to write a memoir about the cultural shock of a Spaniard immigrant in the U.S.? I’m not sure. Fiction is tempting me like a siren’s song, and I may succumb to its charms.

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PROMENADE OF DESIRE

“A brave and unblinkingly honest portrait of a young woman’s sensual and sexual awakening in the face of censure and repression, and her refusal to be held back by the constraints of her family, culture, and religion. The same joyful spirit that expresses itself in Mencos’ love of dancing shines through in her story of her own personal dance into a brave new world beyond the one her mother prescribed for her. Her story is shameless, in the very best sense of the word.”
—Joyce Maynard, New York Times best-selling author of Labor Day, To Die For, and  Count The Ways 

María Isidra is a proper Catholic girl raised in 1960s Spain by a strong matriarch during a repressive dictatorship. Early sexual trauma and a hefty dose of fear keep her in line for much of her childhood, but also lead her to live a double life. In her home, there is no discussing the needs of her growing body. In the street, kissing in public is forbidden.

Upon the dictator’s death in 1975, Spain bursts wide open, giving way to democracy and a cultural revolution. Barcelona’s vibrant downtown and its new freedoms seduce María Isidra. She dives into a world of activism, communal living, literature, counterculture, open sexuality, and alcohol.

And yet she knows something is missing. Longing to reconnect with her body—from which she has felt estranged since childhood—she finds a surprising home in a rundown salsa club, where the lush rhythm sparks a deep wave of healing. Transformed, she sets off on a series of sexual and romantic misadventures, in search for what she has always found painfully elusive: true intimacy.

Promenade of Desire is a rich journey into the life of a woman once contained, who finds a way to set herself free.

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Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona. She spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, bouncing from man to man and job to job while immersing herself in books and dancing. She freelanced for prestigious publishing houses, traveled the world as a tour leader, and worked for the Olympic Committee. In 1992 she moved to the US to earn a PhD in Spanish and Latin American contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught for twelve years.

She also developed her own business as a writer and editor for Spanish-speaking media. From 2006 to 2016 she worked as Editorial Director of the Americas for BabyCenter, the leading global digital resource for parents, and managed teams in several countries. In 2016 she quit her job to dedicate herself to writing. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Front Porch Journal, The Penmen Review, WIRED, The Huffington Post, and Better After Fifty among others. Her essay “My Books and I” was listed as Notable in The Best American Essays Anthology. Today Isidra lives in Northern California with her husband and son.

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