PROMENADE OF DESIRE

A Northern California writer recalls growing up Catholic in Barcelona in the 1960s and her sexual coming-of-age at the end of the Franco regime.

In her debut memoir, essayist and fiction writer Mencos finds parallels between her sexually repressed youth and Spain’s dictatorship. At the age of 5, she discovered how to please herself sexually, but her middle-class mother caught her at it and rebuked her with, “How disgusting!” When she was 6, sexual abuse by a brother further shamed and confused her. In college, she found thrills in one-night stands, but casual relationships left her sexually and emotionally unfulfilled. Looking for what had been missing from her life, she turned to alcohol, activism, communal living, and reading the works of authors from T.S. Eliot to Mario Vargas Llosa. Mencos describes her childhood and her later search for meaning on separate tracks about 10 years apart, showing links between them, and makes Spain come alive with vivid descriptions of the tastes of food and the salsa music that enabled her to move freely in dance clubs and eventually to let loose in other ways. She draws deft parallels between her experiences and the opening of Spanish society post-Franco as attitudes toward sex and culture changed: the covers of magazines grew more risqué, punk found its way onto the radio, the films of Pedro Almodóvar gained prominence. Her immersive approach makes it easy to imagine the author moving through history, navigating its mores and milestones.

A lush memoir and richly detailed exploration of a pivotal era in Spain.