‘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‘A wonderful hybrid book, as monumental as it is intimate. Her words resonate simultaneously with our political and poetic sensibility: with The History of the Vertebrate, all of us crazy women understand the reason behind our melancholy, and we start to sing.’ Marta Sanz ‘"Freedom is therapeutic," someone wrote on the wall of an abandoned madhouse. That inscription is projected onto Mar Garcia Puíg’s extraordinarily liberated book, as well conceived as it is executed. A powerful testimony of her experience of puerperal madness. A delirious and sane tapestry that weaves in various directions.’ Enrique Vila-Matas