“Parenting is very much like a welcome and a farewell that happens at the same time. Many times you live experiences that will be the last time the child experiences them and that provokes something very emotional with the child, due to the urgency of accompanying and not failing them at that moment,” he explains, who not only does not fail but also records each little one. motion. In texts, Neuman speaks without hesitation about his son’s tricks, how he sleeps, walks, and how he contemplates the world around him. He does it in a very raw, but tender way, in the way that such early ages of someone’s life have rarely been portrayed: “I work with an inaccessible memory and with my own, for me it is like turning on a flashlight.” in stages in which no one stops to document,” adds someone who finds himself in a stage “with less time and less energy than ever” but with the passion for writing, “writing requires long spaces and times and it is important to know take that time and prioritize it.”
With all this Neuman also gives light to a book to which he has dedicated a lot of time, affection and observation. A book with which he also creates his own language and in which he makes the exercise of being able to concentrate enough to structure it within this genre in which “the father talks about his child”: “For me it is a genre of walking around the house or oral literature. I think it is a genre that is very present in any family with what we have or transmit, at those ages our childhood belongs to other people’s stories, that is also something extremely literary.”
He also reflects on writing itself through this story: “There is nothing more literary than not distinguishing reality from fiction, or not distinguishing your own memories from other people’s stories. Early childhood is immensely literary because it belongs to other people’s stories, and this book is part of this framework.” With all this Neuman defines little talker as a “secret love letter” that allows him to reflect – and record – the beginning of a life that has only taken its first steps among letters.
