«When I was eleven years old, on the day my parents separated, my mother gave me a dog, Conga, which I kept with me until her death a few years ago. Her arrival was a way of distracting me from the family break-up, but she grew to be both a great accomplice and a kind of mother. Around the same time, my body started to develop and I felt very uncomfortable. I went out a lot at night and had many boyfriends, looking for the security I lacked at home and some kind of approv- al, through the gaze of others, which, of course, I didn’t find. I felt in- creasingly insecure, guilty, and afraid, and I thought the harrass- ment I was experiencing was normal. Meanwhile, my mother seemed to view my transformation into a teenager with concern, partly because we lived in a country like Co- lombia, which only made me doubt myself more. I felt that my body was becoming monstrous, that I was bad, and that sexual desire was very wrong. And I found that most of the girls I grew up with at school had similar feelings. What we all felt, in reality, was a pro- found guilt. The same guilt that condemns us to be cute little girls, then devoted mothers, or, failing at that, to be seen as sluts. It was this sense of guilt, more than anything, that I wanted to explore in La Perra.” Carla Melo