La boca llena de trigo

Since winning a drawing contest in second grade, Anna learned that having a talent also means carrying a promise: the promise not to disappoint. That first prize, a case of markers, suddenly became the self-imposed obligation to always paint better, to surpass that initial achievement. That's why, when, in her thirties, she's offered an opportunity that could catalyze her career as a visual artist, something inside her breaks. The call from Maria Manzoni, the country's most important gallery owner and a highly influential figure in private contemporary art collecting, triggers a profound creative and existential crisis. Anna then faces not only the pressure of the market, but also the memory of a childhood marked by rejection and guilt, a foundational friendship that is crumbling, and the suspicion that perhaps she has betrayed something important along the way... A Mouth Full of Wheat is the story of a child prodigy transformed into a woman trapped by a blank canvas. A story about chance, the tension between freedom and obedience, about the desire to be honest with who she is and what she carries within her. A reflection on self-imposed demands, pretense, and the emotional and economic precariousness of those who try to make their way in a world that still believes in the fiction of meritocracy. With a vivid, ironic, and sharp writing style, Mayte Gómez Molina makes her literary debut with a deeply intimate novel in which the vertigo of being seen and the fear of not being good enough becomes a radical commitment to self-care and caring for others, as a form of resistance. A novel in which art is not a theme, but a wound: what hurts, what saves, what connects us.