In Argentina there is a feminicide every thirty hours. Last June, a great march brought together hundreds of thousands of people, shocked by this plague. In other Latin American countries, and even in Spain, the situation remains alarming. In France, too, there is no point in displaying, as in many other countries where there is more or less a macho violence too often without limits. In this sober but overwhelming book, mixing the personal aspects of her approach with the reconstructed life of three young victims murdered in the prime of life, Selva Almada makes our hearts jump and shout our reason.

MC: What explains all these assassinations of women?

Selva Almada: Femicide is the direct consequence of my country's misogynist and patriarchal culture, and far too many others. Men think they have every right to women's lives, that they can dispose of them, their bodies, their desires, the body of their children.

Did you, yourself, experience any limiting situations?

In this book, I tell a few ordinary anecdotes, daily, that as women we all lived or will live one day. They are, of course, out of all proportion to the horror of feminicide, but I believe that these situations of danger and vulnerability constitute the backdrop that allows a man to murder a woman for the sole reason that she is a woman .

In this "romance", where is the fiction?

It is an investigation, a chronicle, written with the keys to fiction - the only ones I know, since I am not a journalist. But of course I did fieldwork: interviews, testimonies, consultation of judicial files, etc.

To investigate you have, among other things, appealed to a psychic ...

She is a cartomaniac, who has extrasensory experiences of communication with the deceased victims. Beyond what may or may not appear in the cards, what may or may not be revealed to me, the most important thing in these encounters is that they compel me to constantly ask myself why I wanted to write about these women , and what binds me to them. It therefore played a revealing role, obliging me to seek very deeply within myself those answers which, I believe, appear in the book.

You yourself, are you not a little medium?

Let us say, in any case, as this cartomancian pointed out, that I give a voice to these dead women, whose murderers will go unpunished. I wanted to free the memory of these three young victims, who represent the thousands of women murdered in my country, from oblivion.

"Young Dead," ed. Métailié, 17 € .