Fabulosas y rebeldes

In Divas and Rebels, Joana Bonet tells us how her feminine identity evolved, keeping in mind that lesson of Simone de Beauvoir’s: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.”

This is the most personal book by journalist Joana Bonet, which draws on her formative life experiences to tell us how we women have made it through to the present. It is a hard-to-classify book that takes us into the most private parts of her personal history, from her girlhood in a small-town family in Vinaixa in the province of Lleida to her success as a prestigious journalist and director of the most important women’s magazines in Spain. Sensitive, irreverent, intelligent, seductive, a voracious reader, Joana Benet draws on her biography to tell us how we women have made it through to the present day.

Throughout the text, she invoked her female reference points in the worlds of literature, art, and fashion, and how contact with these woman made her the woman she is today.

The book closes with a highly personal selection of forty figures of women she pays homage to, like Coco Chanel, Sylvia Plath, Carmen Laforet, Louise Bourgeois, and Meryl Streep––trailblazers who showed her intriguing ways of being a woman. All this to talk to us about what women are, one on one, without masks, in a soft voice, weaving together public and private.