Why I Wrote F*cked-Up Stories, Brutally Honest Words

A warning before we start

Yes.

I am going to review my own book.

What a stunning lack of humility.

Let’s get over it.

I could also write a fake third-person paragraph saying:

‘With remarkable sensitivity, the author constructs a deeply human work…’

But you would recognize me immediately.

I never say ‘with remarkable sensitivity’ unless I am taking the piss.

So let’s do this properly.

I am going to talk about what I wrote, why I wrote it, what I still like, and what I would do differently today.

Giving birth to the book does not mean I have to claim the baby came out perfect.

This book was not born from an idea. It was born from accumulated shit

Some books begin with a premise.

A woman disappears.

A detective finds a body.

A scientist discovers something that will change the world.

Mine began much less elegantly.

With life.

With relationships.

With people.

With loss.

With fuckups.

With things that were not remotely funny while they were happening and turned, years later, into stories I could tell while laughing.

That is one of memory’s great tricks.

While something is happening, you think:

This is going to kill me.

Five years later:

Wait. Told properly, this is fantastic.

Not because it stopped mattering.

Because my position toward what happened had changed.

And I think that is where F*cked-Up Stories, Brutally Honest Words was really born.

Not from wanting to tell my life story.

From realizing I could finally tell parts of it without letting those parts tell me who I was.

Some stories get told while you are still wounded. Others wait until you understand where the stupidity was

One thing I tried to do in this book was avoid writing from the comfortable role of the perfect victim.

Because how boring would that be?

I could tell plenty of stories this way:

‘Then this horrible person appeared, did this to me, and I—the poor innocent creature—suffered.’

Sounds beautiful.

It would also be a lie.

In some stories, people hurt me.

In others, I was naïve.

In others, I made decisions while knowing perfectly well they could go wrong.

And in more than a few, I probably saw the red flag, the black flag, the siren, and the entire army waving its arms and thought:

Surely it will be different with me.

Ah, the ego.

What a generous sponsor of bad decisions.

That interested me far more.

Real life rarely comes with such a clean cast of heroes and villains.

Sometimes the same person who hurt you also made you happy.

Sometimes you were unfair too.

Sometimes nobody fooled you.

They told you exactly who they were, and you decided that enough love, patience, or concentrated stupidity would turn them into someone else.

That truth hurts more.

It is also much more useful.

The phrase ‘true stories’ always sounds prettier than it should

Saying a book is based on true stories sounds like advertising.

As if that automatically made it deeper.

It does not.

Reality produces an astonishing amount of mediocre material.

All you have to do is open Facebook.

What mattered was not that these stories had happened.

It was finding what lived underneath them.

Because nobody actually cares that a particular thing happened to Yenny Astrid fifteen years ago.

That is my problem.

The interesting part begins when you read something that happened to me and think:

Oh, fuck. I did that too.

That is when the story stops belonging only to me.

And that was one of my obsessions while writing the book.

I did not want to publish a 158-page diary and expect strangers to be polite enough to care.

I wanted to use my stories as a doorway.

You enter through my fuckup.

You leave thinking about your own.

Much more entertaining.

Writing about yourself comes with one small inconvenience: you know the character

When you write fiction, you can decide the protagonist is charming.

When you write about yourself, you have files.

Witnesses.

Memories.

And living people who might say:

‘Honey, that is not exactly how it happened.’

Beautiful.

Memory is not a security camera either.

You remember from the person you are today.

Which means telling a personal story always involves rebuilding it.

That is why I never wanted to sell this book as:

The absolute truth about everything that happened.

It is my version.

My memory.

My experience.

The way I understood those events later.

Two people can live through the same scene and walk away with completely different stories.

Ask any couple after an argument.

Him:

‘I was perfectly calm.’

Her:

‘That motherfucker nearly brought the house down.’

Same Tuesday.

Two documentaries.

The sarcasm is not there for decoration

I did not add sarcasm because I wanted to sound funny.

The sarcasm was there before the book.

Long before it.

Some people process pain by talking.

Others by crying.

Others through therapy.

I have done several of those.

But I also have this possibly defective habit of finding the joke at the most inappropriate possible moment.

And I do not think that makes the experience any less deep.

Quite the opposite.

Some people confuse seriousness with sadness.

As if writing about loss required imaginary violins playing in the background at all times.

No.

You can love somebody deeply and laugh while remembering something stupid they did.

You can tell a story about betrayal and make a joke.

You can survive a terrible period and admit it contained absurd moments too.

Life does not respect genre.

A tragedy can have a comic scene in the middle.

A funeral can have gossip.

A breakup can include sobbing while trying to remember the Netflix password the bastard used.

That is how it works.

‘Sarcastic, crazy, and fucked-up—just like life itself’ was not a pose

The title already came with a warning.

This was never a book designed to sound proper.

I did not want profanity as decoration either.

Saying fuck twenty times does not automatically make a text brave.

Sometimes it only means the writer ran out of vocabulary.

I wanted to write with the same naturalness we use to think things we do not always say aloud.

There is still a kind of writing by women that feels obligated to behave.

To be elegant.

To be inspiring.

To be profound without using a dirty word.

To be strong but pleasant.

To criticize without making anyone too uncomfortable.

I was not in the mood.

My life did not happen in tidy, neutral language.

Neither did my anger.

So why the hell would I write it that way?

Motherhood without the halo

There is something that irritates me deeply whenever people talk about motherhood.

The obligation to sanctify it.

Everything is a blessing.

Everything is love.

Every sacrifice is beautiful.

And you find yourself thinking:

Fine, can we also admit that raising human beings is exhausting?

That we make mistakes.

That sometimes we would like five minutes without anyone saying ‘Mom.’

That loving a child does not magically transform you into an infinitely patient and wise creature.

Real motherhood contains an enormous amount of love.

And exhaustion.

Fear.

Guilt.

Anger.

Mistakes.

Contradictions.

The same things every human bond contains, except with responsibility on a whole other fucking level.

When I wrote about those subjects, I did not want to write either an indictment or a greeting card.

I wanted to tell the story.

And telling it includes the parts that do not look pretty printed on a ‘warrior mom’ mug.

Family: the institution where you learn about love and collect material for therapy

Family is wonderful.

It is also the first place where somebody learns exactly where certain buttons hurt.

Because they helped install them.

No other intimacy quite compares.

Your family knows versions of you that you would like to have legally erased.

The little girl.

The teenager.

The idiot in love.

The one who made that decision.

The one who said that thing at Christmas in 2003.

The statute of limitations never expires.

And yet a large part of who we are comes from there.

From beautiful things.

And from others we spend years trying to understand.

In the book, I did not want to write ‘my family is this.’

I wanted to show specific relationships, moments, affection, and contradictions.

A family can love you deeply and hurt you.

You can love somebody and still need boundaries with them.

You can forgive and continue thinking:

That was still one fucked-up thing to do.

All of that can coexist.

Bad decisions make excellent literature and a terrible quality of life

One of the book’s unofficial conclusions.

Some choices look perfectly reasonable while you are making them.

Later you see them from a distance and think:

Who authorized this woman?

It was you.

That is the humiliating part.

Sometimes you would like to find an outside villain responsible for every disaster.

But no.

Some decisions carry our full signature.

ID number.

Fingerprint.

And facial recognition.

That can also be liberating.

Because if it was always everybody else, you have to wait for everybody else to change.

When you recognize your own participation, you recover something uncomfortable but powerful:

you can choose differently next time.

Or at least make a brand-new mistake.

We have to innovate.

Laughing at yourself is cheaper than manufacturing a heroic version of the past

I have no interest in looking perfect in retrospect.

I find that suspicious.

People who tell stories about their past in which they always made the right decision, said the perfect line, spotted the manipulator immediately, and never humiliated themselves for love clearly lived another species of life.

I did not.

I made a fool of myself.

I trusted where I should not have.

I insisted.

I contradicted myself.

I was wrong.

And I survived the humiliating discovery that on several occasions the obvious answer was exactly where everyone had told me it was.

That is human too.

We love thinking we learn through wisdom.

Bullshit.

A lot of the time, we learn through exhaustion.

You do not always leave a relationship because you finally reached spiritual enlightenment.

You leave because one Tuesday you think:

I am fucking done.

And that is a perfectly legitimate form of growth too.

It is not self-help. Although it will probably help something

Part of the book description calls it ‘alternative self-help.’

And I understand why.

But I did not write a manual.

I do not have seven steps.

Or ten habits.

Or a miracle morning.

God spare me.

I do not want to tell anybody how to live.

I am barely sorting out my own life.

What I can do is show you a disaster and say:

Look.

I was there.

This is what I thought.

This is what I did.

This went completely to shit.

This is what I understood later.

Do whatever you want with that information.

That feels more honest to me.

Some books tell you:

This is how you get over it.

I prefer:

This is how I got through it. Maybe some part will help you.

What I like most about F*cked-Up Stories, Brutally Honest Words today

That I did not try to sound wiser than I was.

Some things were written from the person I was at one particular moment.

Today, I might tell them differently.

That does not invalidate them.

It makes them a record.

I like that the book preserves a voice that existed long before I published books.

The same voice I used in long posts online.

The one that makes fun of things.

The one that exaggerates.

The one that gets pissed off.

The one that can begin by talking about something stupid and end by asking a fairly serious question.

I do feel that voice is there.

And I would not want to edit it until it became ‘literarily impeccable.’

You can edit so much personality out of a text that it ends up looking like a model apartment:

pretty.

clean.

and nobody lives there.

There is one thing I would defend completely

The honesty.

Not honesty as in ‘I told absolutely every detail of my life.’

That would be exhibitionism, not necessarily honesty.

I mean a different kind of honesty:

not trying to make myself look good in every story.

That was the risk.

Because when you write about yourself, you control the camera.

You can put yourself in the best light.

Edit certain scenes.

Choose what to show.

We all do that when we tell our lives.

I do it too.

But I tried to let the protagonist look ridiculous.

Wrong.

Contradictory.

Badly exposed.

Because that is where a person appears.

Not a personal brand.

Publishing your own life can also feel like closing case files

A story that still controls you is extremely difficult to tell well.

Because you are still trying to win it.

To prove something.

To persuade.

To defend yourself.

After enough has shifted inside you, the story changes.

It does not necessarily stop hurting.

But you no longer need the reader to rule in your favor.

And some stories in this book are exactly that for me.

Closed case files.

Not because everything was resolved.

Life rarely goes to that trouble.

Closed because I no longer need another trial.

It happened.

I was that woman.

I did that.

Someone did something else to me.

And here I am.

Next case.

The title makes more sense after you read it

F*cked-Up Stories, Brutally Honest Words.

It might look like nothing more than a provocative title.

It is not.

Well, it is that too.

Let’s not play innocent.

But it always meant something else to me.

Some stories end with you thinking:

What a fucking story.

Not because sex was involved.

Because it was too much.

Too absurd.

Painful.

Unexpected.

Ridiculous.

Human.

And the writing comes out of that.

Not perfectly organized.

Not purified.

It comes out carrying the mess it was born in.

That is why I still like the subtitle:

Sarcastic, crazy, and fucked-up—just like life itself.

Not because life is literally any of those three things.

Although some Tuesdays make me wonder.

Because life changes tone without warning.

Today it gives you something.

Tomorrow it takes it away.

It makes you cry, and twenty minutes later something stupid happens that makes you laugh.

That is profoundly indecent.

And very difficult to write if you insist on keeping one tone the entire time.

Who did I write this book for?

For the person who fucked up and still feels ashamed.

For anyone who looks back and thinks:

How did I let that happen?

For anyone who loved badly.

For anyone who lost someone.

For anyone who was wrong about someone.

For anyone who grew up in an imperfect family.

For anyone who had to laugh after crying.

For anyone who needs proof that intelligence does not vaccinate you against stupid decisions.

I can personally confirm that.

And especially for people who are tired of books where the author arrives fully enlightened to explain how you should have lived.

I arrived with stories.

That is different.

Do I recommend F*cked-Up Stories, Brutally Honest Words?

I would be a real asshole if I said no.

Of course I recommend it.

I wrote the damn thing.

Let’s not get carried away with objectivity.

But I would not recommend it to everybody.

If you need exemplary protagonists, impeccably proper language, and moral lessons that can be printed over a sunrise, go find another book.

If you think profanity is proof of moral decay, you should probably do the same.

We can save each other the irritation.

But if you have ever laughed at a disaster after surviving it…

if you have stories you tell better today than you lived them…

if you ever said ‘I would never do that’ immediately before doing exactly that…

we will probably understand each other.

In the end, the book is not about my life

And that is what I wanted most.

Yes.

The stories are mine.

The names, places, emotions, and memories come from my experience.

But if the book worked only because you wanted to know what happened to Yenny Astrid Londoño, it would have failed.

I am not that interesting.

Nobody is interesting for 158 consecutive pages.

The book works when something of mine wakes up something of yours.

My mother makes you think of yours.

One bad decision reminds you of another.

A loss opens a memory.

A joke makes you think:

Oh, shit. Me too.

That is where the kind of literature I care about happens.

Not when the reader admires the writer.

When the reader recognizes herself.

And that is why, after all the stories, all the mistakes, and all the brutally honest words, the conclusion still feels fairly simple to me:

I wrote the book with my life.

But it does not necessarily speak only about me.