image copyrightNolan Rada
Think for a second: what does your hair mean to you? If one day you lost it for no apparent reason, what would you be willing to give or what would you give up to have it again?
Hair, writes Melanie Pérez Arias (Caracas, 1986), is something that does not bleed, but hurts. And in "An animal that lets itself fall" (Lumen, 2025), her first novel, is the starting point for an entire intimate journey about identity, losses, renunciations and, above all, friendship in a feminine key.
The Venezuelan-Peruvian journalist and writer travels with Miriam, the protagonist, through a city and countries that she does not name to make a story more universal that anyone can identify with: that of a body that fails without warning, of the group of friends that is the chosen family, of the network of silences, taboos and myths that surround, even today, the female body.
In a book that is Latin America but, above all, is the Caribbean - syncretism, humor in the midst of tragedy and a touch of salsa -, Pérez Arias also makes a narrative spell by preventing the story he tells from touching the present of his country of birth. And he does it, he says, as a political decision.
BBC Mundo speaks with her on the occasion of the Hay Festival that is held in Arequipa from November 5 to 8.
image copyrightLUMEN
In principle, the theme of your book is hair, hair as identity.
Yes, although I would even say that the topic is an anecdote, the starting point, when the protagonist begins to lose her hair one day and doesn't understand why.
But at the center, there are two key themes within the book: friendship, specifically female friendship, and identity, about who we are when what we thought we were no longer works or has expired or due to some supernatural and inexplicable event. I'm not that anymore so, what and who am I?
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Since the book is fiction, what about you in that search, that change of identity?
It is a book about transformation and identity searches, which in my opinion are intimate, they occur first in a very tiny space of the soul and from there, they can be reflected externally.
But for me, the transformation of identity, also as a migrant woman writer, is always a constant search, not only for who I am now, for the place I occupy, but for what small changes are taking place.
In your essence, in your personality, how you allow yourself to be influenced by your environment, how what you believed to be true for you like a cathedral crumbles and how much beauty there is also in that destruction of what you were and in the construction of the new.
We are traversed by stories about change that are very harsh and apocalyptic, but those small transformations where time passes and suddenly you discover that yes, I am the same, but I am not the same, there, in that space as different, I find that there is a lot of beauty.
And being accompanied in this process of change is a great fortune. In the case of Miriam, who is the protagonist, she is accompanied by her friends in this change that she has to experience and furthermore, part of what I wanted to build in this character was that accompaniment that she gives herself when she begins to reflect in a very intimate way about what is happening with her hair, but also what is happening with her life, her loves, her affections, her relationship, with work, even with her free time.
What happens when the body fails?
The body makes decisions that have little to do with you and at the same time have everything to do with you. We never know what happens to Miriam, but for them it is a kind of betrayal.
There is a whole current that talks about somatization and how our thoughts influence the body, but in reality, part of what I also wanted to capture in this book is the idea of the body as a mystery, because we live in a time where we want to overexplain everything and understand absolutely everything that is happening with each of our microcells. And many things are not within our control.
For me it is something very revealing of how much of that I have to let go and how much of that I have to accept as destiny.
Another layer that runs through the entire book is the theme of beauty, to the point that the protagonist prefers death rather than being hairless. As a woman, as a Venezuelan, how have you lived the yoke of beauty that reaches that extreme.
That was quite a journey for me too, because as a Venezuelan woman, where my identity, my culture is completely crossed by these searches for prototypical beauty starting with Miss Venezuela, this has a very strong weight on us.
I have lived in Peru for years and returned to Venezuela in 2023, and a good part of the comments had to do with my physical transformation: how many kilos I had, more or less, how my hair was, how much I had aged.
In the book I needed my protagonist to be a completely nondescript person, who doesn't care about this, because if it were something of life or death for her, I end up killing her at the end of the book because her hair is falling out and she can't resist it.
image copyrightThierry Monasse/Corbis via Getty Images
About the hair you write "it's not something that bleeds, but it hurts."
I was wondering why hair wouldn't be important. Why wouldn't hair be a reason to grieve? Why wouldn't losing your hair be a reason to grieve? It's not an arm, it's not a limb, you're not really in mortal danger, but it has to do with you, with self-image. And losing that image is also a process that we should not underestimate.
And in our culture it is there. Throughout Latin culture, but in Venezuela, there are even books that talk about how the image of Miss has been a transcendental asset for our culture, for our identity. We had always been recognized as the country of oil, the peloteros (baseball players) and the misses. It's no small thing. In my case, part of the transformation process of migration is accepting that which is identity from another perspective, much more critical, but also with tenderness.
You said at the beginning that the story is about friendship, but specifically between women. And it is true that men hardly appear or are very secondary.
This is a story where the ensemble of women is the protagonist, but let's say that the decision was not as political as I would like to admit. It wasn't that I thought "I'm going to leave the male characters behind." Many decisions around literature have to do with what history asks of you and this one demanded a very feminine fraternity, because it has to do with discoveries of issues that have to do with the body, with old age. And I needed my protagonist to be well cared for over time and I needed my protagonist to be well cared for with these friends.
As millennial women, we are also going through a process of decentralizing the romantic relationship and decentering men from everything that our life experience means. I'm not saying it's exclusive to recent times, but in this case I needed these friends to be there for her, so that the story would also move forward.
Also, personally, friendship is very important and I always say that I can't imagine where I would be right now if it weren't for my friends, I can't imagine and it's terrifying.
There is a moment when you put in a character's mouth that "you are not old, you must have some romance." And in many parts of the novel you highlight that, how women at an age seem to have no right to love, desire, and are even invisible. Why did you want to capture this?
There is a book that was very important for me in the process of writing this novel, which is 'On the Bones of the Dead', by Olga Tocarzuk, Nobel Prize winner. In that novel the protagonist is a woman in her 50s and begins to commit crimes supported by the anonymity that being a woman of a certain age gives her. That novel blew my mind.
Although I am still far from that moment in life, in reality what I find are many stories from older women in my life who tell me that it is a good stage. We are dominated by the story that with postmenopause everything is going to be wrong with your body and, furthermore, in the women's process, not only are you going to have a physical challenge, but you are going to be erased from the face of the Earth.
But in my novel the answer is no, we are still here, we have the right to a body, to pleasure, to exploration, to even transform ourselves and be completely different people, with the right to be seen and read. We still have many challenges as women, but the future for older women does not look catastrophic, it looks like a future of freedom.
One of the things that goes through this novel are the taboos around women's health. Are we over this?
There is something important and that is that this novel takes place at the end of the 90s. That is, Miriam, the protagonist, was a child around the years 45-50. It is another historical moment where women still received more comments like "don't bathe when you have your period, don't ride a bike, you can't, you can't, you can't."
I do believe that there is progress now, although it is still primary, closely linked to urban areas. Girls who grow up in the provinces of our Latin American countries are left out. In Venezuela itself we have a big problem with everything that has to do with menstrual health, sexual health for girls does not exist, there is no information. There is a very great vulnerability.
There is more access to education, information and dissemination online, but I do not think that the myths around, for example, menstruation are completely debunked. Because, furthermore, the female body remains a mystery.
Was it a political decision that your novel took place in the 90s and not later? (Hugo Chávez came to power in 1998)
It was an absolutely political decision that the novel took place towards the end of the 90s and, in fact, almost in 1998.
It was a narrative decision, because if Miriam was in the present, she goes to ChatGPT or Google and knows why her hair is falling out and the novel is 30 pages long. But it was also something absolutely conscious and political to leave out everything that had to do with the recent history of Venezuela and with Chavismo. I didn't want them to appear at any time, because they are already too omnipresent in my history and in the history of the country for them to also appear in my first novel.
For those who know Venezuela, the novel is a journey through many of its landscapes, which you do not name, but they are there. What was it like writing about those places while in Lima.
The fact is that I finished the novel while in Venezuela. But, before, it was interesting to write about a geographical territory without being in it and also without mentioning it, because I didn't want there to be too many signs, names. From nostalgia we have the need to fill with names, rename things, wear things that say "cambur" (banana).
From nostalgia, we need to name our spaces and recover our language, but I wanted the novel to be like a more open space, because this is a much more universal story. I wanted people from all over the world to be able to travel to that place where the protagonists are.
Image source, JUAN BARRETO/AFP via Getty Images
Miriam turns to science, turns to friends, turns to Santeria.
Santería is everywhere, Yoruba culture, Santeria, the Yoruba religion is everywhere, not only in Venezuela, but in the Caribbean basin, and it is part of our legacy, also as colonized countries and as countries.
That we also received the entire African culture through slavery. Denying it or trying to cover it with only the Catholic religion, or even demonizing it, is a drive that exists within the Caribbean culture. But these manifestations always find a way to find their way.
Obviously all things have a light side and a dark side, but I was interested in my characters being in contact with the light side of this religion and this culture, because science also abandons my protagonist.
She doesn't understand why her hair is falling out, she doesn't get answers. What I do? And we have all at some point gone through the idea of what if I read my letters? What if I throw some snails at myself? What if I ask the horoscope? Because it is normal, it is very typical as well as our culture.
And I wanted it to be portrayed in a very respectful way, with great beauty, from the light, because obviously, in addition, that is how I experienced it while I lived in Venezuela. In that relationship with the magical, with the mysterious, there is something so intimate and so deep that I did not want to leave out in the novel.
What do you want people to take away from your novel?
Let them approach the novel with the curiosity of getting to know these characters for whom I am so fond. They are characters that are endearing to me, that I can perhaps promise will stay with readers for a long time.
I would like you to approach the novel with that curiosity and something that I would like you to take away when you finish it is that there are things that we are not going to know how to explain about what our body does, but I hope to be accompanied along the way by characters and by people who love you and who make things a little easier for you on this very strange journey that is discovering ourselves as humans: fallible and with bodies to which things happen, because things happen to bodies.
And in that story, in that experience, I hope to be accompanied by friends and people. That they give you support and make you laugh.
Part of what I wanted was for the novel not to be an unfathomable drama about women in crisis and on the verge of a nervous breakdown, to quote, but rather for it to be a challenging, difficult journey, but one where you could breathe, where there was air and that air was also marked by humor, by the desire to laugh at our tragedies, which is the most Latin American thing that exists.
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