Five takeaways about motherhood from our charla with author Catalina Infante Beovic
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Motherhood is often described as instinctive, joyful, even idyllic. But in an intimate, audience-only Q&A following Hola Cultura’s “charla,” a chat or discussion, on April 16 with Chilean author Catalina Infante, a strikingly different take was offered — one characterized by contradiction and a physical and emotional toll.
Infante is a writer, publisher and co-owner of Librería Catalonia in the Chilean capital, Santiago. Her novel “The Cracks We Bear” was featured in Hola Cultura’s book column, Hola Escritores, earlier this month. Originally written in Spanish and published in Chile as “La grieta” in 2023, the English edition, translated by Michelle Mirabella, was published last fall by World Editions.
Last Thursday, via Zoom from her home in the Southern Cone — the southernmost part of South America — Infante, accompanied by Mirabella, presented a rare view on motherhood that replaced familiar myths with something far more complex and real.
Here are our top five takeaways from la charla.
1. Motherhood lives in the body
Infante views motherhood as more than merely an abstract idea. “These types of things live in the body,” she said, referring to the postpartum experience and the grief of losing the person you were before motherhood. While “The Cracks We Bear” is a work of fiction, it draws on Infante’s own experiences becoming a mother, losing one and being a reporter for many years at a women’s magazine in Chile, which put her in the orbit of mothers and their stories.
2. The novel illustrates the contradictions inherent in the motherhood experience
Rather than presenting motherhood as a single, definable experience, Infante told the audience, “Life is really ambivalent.” Pushing back against the notion that emotions must be neatly categorized, both Infante’s novel and her remarks last week drilled into the tumult of emotions motherhood comprises and how it can encompass love, frustration and tiredness all at once. This refusal to accept cliched views of motherhood makes the novel both unsettling and deeply familiar.
3. Silence, shame and fear shape women’s lives across generations
Infante pointed to silence as a powerful, inherited force between the mother and daughter in her story. “There wasn’t a lot of talking,” she said of the dynamic that shaped her protagonist’s upbringing. That absence of language and open discussion creates emotional distance for the protagonist that lingers into adulthood. More broadly, Infante framed silence, shame and fear as recurring elements in women’s lives, often reinforced by social expectations to keep these emotions hidden or unspoken. “Shame, fear … this is a part of the story of women,” she told the audience.
4. Translation becomes a shared act of storytelling
For Mirabella, translating “The Cracks We Bear” came after years of working alongside Infante to translate her short stories. She described the act of translation as more than just changing words from one language to another. “You’re getting my performance of her text,” she explained. Mirabella and Infante told the audience how they first met and started working together in 2020. Their yearslong collaboration has led to a close relationship between author and translator, resulting in what Mirabella described as a process of “rewriting … in collaboration with someone else.”
5. It’s hard to separate personal and political histories
Although Infante told the audience she did not initially intend to write for an international audience, Chile’s history inevitably provided a backdrop for the narrative — particularly its dictatorship from 1973 to 1990 and the lives of exiles that mirror her own family history. These forces, she explained, are part of the “cracks” her characters bear. They are not background details, she explained. “This experience broke families … it broke the world also … and it’s part of the cracks they both carry,” she said, echoing the novel’s central metaphor.
The conversation revealed a version of motherhood that resists easy storytelling. Instead of comfort, Infante offered honesty, acknowledging the weight mothers carry and the stories that too often go untold.
Check out our review and read other Hola Escritores book columns.
– Copy edited by Valerie Izquierdo and Kami Waller
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