Reading Faltas is to encounter a woman laying claim to her truth—not out of a desire for pity or resolution, but because some stories must be told simply to be laid down. In this blistering, tender, and genre-defying collection of letters, the late, beloved Cecilia Gentili writes directly to the people of her hometown in Galvez: her friends, her enemies, her mother, her abuser’s daughter—everyone except the man who raped her. The result is a radical reclamation of narrative, a transfemme survivor’s archive of pain, beauty, betrayal, and becoming.

Gentili’s voice is impossible to ignore. It’s sharp with wit, soaked in longing, and devastating in its clarity. Through a mosaic of memory, she maps the terrain of her childhood in poverty, tracing how systemic failures and intimate betrayals conspired to deny her safety and dignity—but never her brilliance. Her writing refuses clean arcs or easy redemption; instead, Faltas pulses with contradictions. She is furious and forgiving, full of grace and entirely unwilling to extend it where it hasn’t been earned.

Many of these letters center on the women in Gentili’s life—her mother, her grandmother, her friends—and the complex ways they upheld or challenged the violence around her. Womanhood, as portrayed in Faltas, is both sanctuary and snare. Cecilia learns early that femininity can be punished or performed, commodified or withheld—and that even being desired can feel like a kind of safety. And still, she shines through it all, demanding to be seen not as a symbol or a survivor or a cautionary tale, but as a girl who deserved love, and a woman who created herself from the wreckage.

This book is not easy, but it is essential. Gentili’s epistolary approach cracks open the confessional form and lets it bleed, defiant and unrepentant. She doesn’t write for the comfort of the reader—she writes because she has to, because she deserves to. Faltas is a triumph of voice, a fierce act of self-possession, and a necessary addition to any bookshelf that values trans truth-telling, survivor rage, and the power of language to name what others insist we forget.

Cecilia Gentili left behind more than a legacy—she left behind a challenge: to remember, to speak, and to love ourselves enough to tell it anyway.

📖 Read this if you love: pro-survivor memoirs, trans rage and resilience, dark humor in the face of trauma, and the works of Carmen Maria Machado or Vivek Shraya.

🔑 Key Themes: Childhood Sexual Abuse and Accountability, Trans Femme Identity and Longing, Poverty and Feminized Survival, Motherhood and Matrilineal Inheritance, Reclamation and Resistance Through Storytelling.