The More People Piss Me Off, the Better Time I Have

Maruja Torres no longer travels to write about the world. She travels to find out how many of life’s blows she can take without ceasing to seek beauty.

In this fierce, funny, and deeply human book, Maruja travels across much of the world while everything around her falls apart: certainties, friendships, cities, and even language itself. There are wars, hotels, journalists, old loves, waiters, doctors, taxi drivers, memories, arguments with her editor, and even a Lacanian psychoanalyst. There is also anger at the same old scoundrels and tenderness towards those who still sustain life through small gestures. Above all, there is an unshakable conviction: the worse the world gets, the more important it is to protect the good moments.

With the irony, emotional intelligence, and political insight that have made her one of the country's great chroniclers, Maruja Torres offers us her freest book yet: a luminous blend of memory, current affairs, travel, grief, humour, and inner resilience.

Because truly living remains the best way to defy convention and, although this is neither a second part nor a continuation, the adventure goes on.