Her new book explores motherhood through memory, imperfection and power.
BUENOS AIRES
Argentine writer Adriana Riva is challenging one of society’s most persistent cultural ideals: the belief that motherhood should embody unconditional goodness, emotional certainty and personal perfection. In her latest book, Entre otras, she explores the contradictions of maternal relationships through literary fragments, family memories and reflections on the unequal power that exists between parents and children.
The book emerged from a creative-writing exercise led by Argentine author Federico Falco. Inspired by the fragmentary literary methods of David Markson, Riva began collecting references to mothers in literature, biography and everyday life. What started as a few pages gradually became an exploration of how difficult it can be to understand someone whose presence has shaped an entire life.
Rather than constructing a conventional narrative, Entre otras moves between personal observations, quotations and brief accounts of relationships involving writers and their mothers. Figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes and Arthur Conan Doyle appear within a larger investigation of attachment, memory and family identity.
One recurring image involves a daughter examining her mother’s belongings, searching through notebooks, household objects and ordinary records. These traces reveal aspects of a person’s existence while leaving something fundamental beyond reach. The accumulation of evidence does not necessarily produce a complete understanding of the individual who created it.
Riva’s interest extends beyond her personal experience. As both a daughter and a mother of three women, she examines how family roles change across generations and how expectations surrounding motherhood influence the way women understand themselves.
In an interview with Infobae Cultura, conducted by Luciano Sáliche, Riva rejects the ideal of an entirely virtuous mother. Her argument is not that parental responsibility becomes irrelevant when perfection proves impossible. Rather, she questions the cultural expectation that a mother should exist outside ordinary human contradictions.
The distinction carries psychological significance, although Riva’s reflections should be understood as literary and personal interpretations rather than clinical findings. Parents can experience affection, frustration, uncertainty and competing responsibilities without those emotions determining the quality of every relationship.
A more difficult issue concerns power. Riva describes the relationship between mother and child as initially unequal because children depend on adults for their survival and protection. That asymmetry creates responsibilities extending beyond affection, particularly when authority risks becoming coercive or harmful.
Her observations invite consideration of how parental power changes as children develop greater independence. A relationship initially organized around protection may later require negotiation, emotional distance and recognition of increasingly separate identities.
The writer also examines historical changes in parenting. She contrasts earlier, more hierarchical family structures with contemporary relationships in which parents and children may share cultural interests and experience less rigid generational boundaries.
These transformations do not imply that every family has become more equal or that older forms of authority have disappeared. They suggest that expectations about parenting are culturally and historically shaped rather than permanently fixed.
Riva connects these developments with broader changes in women’s rights while acknowledging that economic and social inequalities persist. Her perspective resists portraying either past or present motherhood as a uniform experience.
That refusal to generalize is central to the book’s literary approach. Mothers may be remembered through acts of care, conflict, absence or unresolved emotional demands. Their identities cannot always be reduced to the roles their children assign them.
Entre otras consequently raises a question that extends beyond family literature: how much of another person can be reconstructed through memories, possessions and stories?
For Riva, motherhood provides an especially intimate setting in which to examine that uncertainty. The mother is familiar, yet not necessarily fully understood; influential, yet never entirely defined by her relationship with her children.
The book does not offer a formula for successful parenting. Its contribution lies in questioning the expectation that complex human relationships should produce morally simple characters.
In doing so, Riva returns motherhood to a more demanding literary territory, where affection and authority coexist, memories remain incomplete and imperfection cannot be removed from the experience of being human.
Behind Every Story, Human Complexity Matters.