Isidra Mencos
Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona. She spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, bouncing from man to man and job to job while immersing herself in books and dancing. She freelanced for prestigious publishing houses, traveled the world as a tour leader, and worked for the Olympic Committee. In 1992 she moved to the US to earn a PhD in Spanish and Latin American contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught for twelve years. She also developed her own business as a writer and editor for Spanish-speaking media. From 2006 to 2016 she worked as Editorial Director of the Americas for BabyCenter, the leading global digital resource for parents, and managed teams in several countries. In 2016 she quit her job to dedicate herself to writing. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Front Porch Journal, The Penmen Review, WIRED, The Huffington Post, and Better After Fifty among others. Her essay "My Books and I" was listed as Notable in The Best American Essays Anthology. Today Isidra lives in Northern California with her husband and son.
Twitter: @IsidraMencos
Instagram: @IsidraMencos
What’s the oddest thing a reader has ever asked you?
When my husband read the Advanced Reader Copy of my memoir, his first question was, “Do you have a lover?” I was flabbergasted. We’ve been married twenty-five years, and I’ve never been unfaithful or given him any reasons to think I was. The book, however, is quite spicy, and I guess he may have thought for a moment that I was still that crazy twenty-five-year-old woman who devoured books and men.
Is there a genre of music that influences your writing/thinking? Do you listen to music while you write?
Salsa music has had an enormous presence in my life, and therefore, in my memoir. When I discovered salsa in my late teens, it wasn’t yet popular in Barcelona. There was only one club in the red-light district, appropriately called Tabú. I spent three or four nights a week there, dancing until five in the morning. Salsa became a catalyst not just for my sensuality, but also for my relationships. Many of my friends, boyfriends, and later my husband are involved with salsa one way or the other, either as passionate dancers/listeners, journalists, event producers, or radio broadcasters.
I don’t usually listen to music while I’m writing because I get so absorbed I don’t even hear it, but if I do, I choose classic jazz or classical music. Salsa is for dancing and having fun.
What period of history do you wish you knew more about?
The intersection of history/politics with private lives has always fascinated me because I firmly believe that we are a product of our context. I’m particularly interested in periods of political transition because change always creates tension.
My PhD thesis was about the symbolism of Carnival in Spanish romantic works. The passion for costume parties took Madrid by storm at the turn of the eighteenth century, and my theory is that they expressed the discomfort with a society transitioning from rigidly hierarchal to socially mobile; the costumes symbolized how people from the lower classes could suddenly “pass” as something else if they had enough money.
Likewise, when I wrote my memoir, I knew from the get-go that I’d put a lot of emphasis on the historical context, which was also a transition, in this case from dictatorship to democracy.
We are going through a transitional period right now in the U.S. The ethnic make-up of the country is rapidly changing, and the increasing diversity is causing a lot of tension in certain sectors that are not used to losing power, even if it’s only in their numbers. We are also seeing an erosion of democracy, so in a sense, the U.S. nowadays is going through the opposite transition that I went through in my youth.
What piece of clothing tells the most interesting story about your life?
I published an essay entitled “The Dress” which described a sexy dress that made me a men’s magnet, and why at some point I chose to leave it behind (as I left behind a certain persona of my youth).
Nowadays, I am very attached to a piece of clothing that I’ve never worn: a one-foot tall “peineta,” a traditional Spanish comb that women used to wear on their head, covered with an embroidered shawl (a “mantilla”). It was my mother’s. I have many gorgeous photos of my mom wearing the “peineta” and the “mantilla.” Even if I never have an occasion to wear it, it means a lot to me, because it speaks of my family legacy, as well as of a centuries-long Spanish tradition.
Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?
I speak four languages: Spanish (my native tongue); Catalan (also learned as a child, because it was the language of my region in Spain); French (which I started to learn in school at four years of age); and English, which I started learning at 16. I have now lived in the U.S. for thirty years and consider myself fully bilingual (although I do have a noticeable accent!)
I’m constantly switching between English and Spanish in my head and in my writing.
It’s been a fun challenge to write my memoir in English. It has given me a different voice than the one I had as a Spanish-language writer, more direct and less adjective-heavy. It has also helped me take more risks with the content because most of my siblings don’t speak English, so I felt safe from their scrutiny and criticism. Of course, now I also want to publish my memoir in Spanish, but since the topic was risqué, writing in a non-native language created a little distance and allowed me to express myself with less fear.
