Full Description
'On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.'
On a single day, Mar García Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal, as Puig's grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles.
The History of the Vertebrate offers a searing account of postpartum psychosis. In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life.
The History of the Vertebrate is at once intimate and monumental. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them.
