She welcomes us in a dress slit up to the top of her thighs, plastic flip-flops on her feet. In this alcove of a hotel in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Camila Sosa Villada seems to have just stepped off the stage. The Argentinian novelist, who shook up the Latin American literary landscape with The Vilaines (Métailié, 2021), a first novel partly inspired by her life, about a group of transvestite prostitutes, is also an accomplished actress and singer.
Born a man, under the name Cristian, in 1982, and calling herself a “transvestite” rather than “trans”, she made a name for herself in theatre and cabarets, before acting in cinema and playing the lead role in a television series, Mia. An experience that nourishes his new novel, History of a domesticationwhere a transsexual star actress sees her life take a new turn the day she agrees to marry a wealthy gay lawyer. And even more so when the couple decides to adopt an HIV-positive child. Farewell, beloved freedom, and welcome to the constraints of a fairly standard family life, which soon becomes sclerotic.
It was in a café, during a breakfast with a friend, himself an actor and homosexual, that the idea for this book came to the novelist, she says: “The owner of the bar came in with his wife and baby, and they looked a lot like us. At one point, my friend started playing with the baby, and it was like we were alone, him, the baby and me. The owner asked us if we wanted to have children. So I put together part of the story.”
Although the writer categorically rejects the idea of becoming a mother herself (she is too attached to her independence), she uses this scene to write the synopsis of a film exploring the relationship between these two parents and their baby. Very inspired by the film Opening Nightby John Cassavetes (1977), she also produced a novel from it in 2019 for a collection of contemporary literature from the major Argentinian daily Page/12. The film, titled History of a domesticationlike the book, will be made four years later, under the direction of Javier van de Couter. She plays the leading role, but without her boyfriend, with whom she has fallen out in the meantime.
While filming it, Camila Sosa Villada, a perfectionist, becomes aware of certain weaknesses in her novel, which she wrote in six months. And decides, even though it has already been published, to rewrite it. “I barely left the set and went home to work there.she explains. I revisited the links between the characters by emphasizing the tormented side of the relationship between the actress and her director and by insisting on her manipulative and aggressive aspect. I also explored the incestuous relationship between the actress and her half-brother in more depth.”
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