» Joanot Martorell Prize 2020

A heartrending novel about mothers, daughters, and a cruel illness that condemns people to forgetting. Pepa Aguar’s literary debut.

Forgetting mows down life’s beautiful moments. Little by little, but quickly, the mother who was your mother vanishes. Her bright spots are fewer and fewer; she no longer kisses you with tenderness and joy, and she doesn’t say your name so often. All those things came before the verb remember took on body and weight. From then to now, Fineta stopped being what she was. A sad, cruel illness is clouding her mind. Everything that formed part of her life––the fruit store in the village of Benetússer, close to Valencia, the meetings with relatives and friends, the stories about Grandma Teresa, whom she treasures—all that is consigned to oblivion. Only her daughter’s sporadic returns to the village she left years ago to study and work in Barcelona away from her family bring back the occasional spark of memory and lucidity.

What I Have Left of You talks about women, grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, about the words still remaining to be said. Powerless, we witness the liturgy of a disease that inevitably leads to forgetting. But in the process of loss, we also witness the liturgy of remembering, a thousand-year-old liturgy that has names, a body, weight, and light, and that offers us a portrait of three women, three generations from the same family.