GARCÍA PUIG, Mar
The History of the Vertebrate. On Madness and Motherhood

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; García 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.

In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, García 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.

At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, García 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. [publishers’ note]

“Nothing sentimental creeps into this portrait of motherhood. García Puig writes from within anxiety, grief, obsession, and psychic terror – the states that churn when new life arrives and refuses reassurance. She exposes how women have long been venerated and blamed in the same breath. Leaning into madness as much as clarity, García Puig carries with her the mothers who came before – Hecuba, Medea, Isabella Thackeray, the unnamed women punished for loving too much or too poorly. This is a breathtaking, ferocious book about maternal responsibility.”
—Jamieson Webster

Translated by Mara Faye Lethem.

Published by Peninsula Press, 2026
Essays / Health / Politics