Elena Knows

abortion, which was eventually approved by the National Congress on 30th December 2020.

Elena Knows also asks the reader to put themselves in Elena’s unenviable place of age and infirmity.

both women come to realise that not knowing, and not fitting into neat categories, is something that they share

Rita is seen to rigidly accept the church’s doctrines to the extent of imposing them on a stranger, preventing Isabel from having the abortion she desperately wants; indeed Rita and her middle-aged boyfriend Roberto are ‘united by their convictions […] about how another person should experience something they themselves had never experienced’ (p.88).

The story traces an arc from hubris to humility on Elena’s part, and from conviction to despair on the part of her daughter, Rita, though this trajectory is masked by a non-chronological development.

Elena Knows goes beyond its elements of crime investigation to raise urgent ethical questions, challenge religious hypocrisy and shake Catholic dogma to its

which is Piñeiro’s most sustained intervention, through the medium of fiction, in the long campaign to legalise abortion.

, I think she couldn’t stand that you had it.

She thought a more accurate mantra would be shit, shit, shit.

d I’m condemned to watch as her body dies without her dying.