SOURCE: "The Writer's Kitchen," translated by Diana L. Vélez, in Lives on the Line: The Testimony of Contemporary Latin American Authors, edited by Doris Meyer, University of California Press, 1988, pp. 212-27.

In the following essay, adapted by the author from a speech, Ferré discusses her personal motivations for writing fiction. Ferré states: "Writing is for me above all a physical knowledge, an irrefutable proof that my human form — individual and collective — exists. But writing is also an intellectual knowledge, the discovery of a form that precedes me. It is only through pleasure that we can encode the testimony of the particular in the experience of the general, as a record of our history and our time."

I How to Let Yourself Fall from the Frying Pan Into the Fire

Throughout time, women narrators have written for many reasons: Emily Brontë wrote to prove the revolutionary nature of...