Die schlechte Gewohnheit

The literary sensation from Spain – straddling raw realism and profound tenderness. The narrator of this novel falls in love for the first time with a fallen angel, a dead hero on the streets of San Blas. Growing up in the body of a boy and only experiencing fleeting moments of stolen happiness behind closed doors with her mother’s rouge and lipstick, she charts her path: starting in a working-class neighborhood of Madrid, which couldn’t be further from the vibrant capital of Spain, whose nightlife becomes a center of the queer scene in the eighties. As she grows up, families unironically debate whether a drug-addicted or a homosexual son faces the harsher fate, and thus it is the outsiders, triumphant nymphs and wild chimeras, who become her companions. Amidst poverty and violence, political class oppression and moments of secret solidarity, she slowly, agonizingly slowly, becomes who she has always been.

“I highly recommend reading Alana Portero's novel The Bad Habit. It shows how much suffering and pain results from being born in the wrong body – and how dangerous it can be.” Pedro Almodóvar.

The Bad Habit is an inverted hero's journey, written in dazzlingly beautiful language, where vibrant outsiders form a community that makes survival possible. Told with the class consciousness of Annie Ernaux, the raw realism of Shuggie Bain, the thrill of breaking boundaries from Virginie Despentes, and the sense for outsider figures of Pedro Almodóvar, the novel is equally shocking and healing.