"Second First Person" by Sylvia Molloy is a story about love and long-standing friendships between two women. A literary baptism of fire, created thanks to a paradox: a masterful text is born, its tightly packed words seem to "fall out" of it, while one of the characters – the subject of the book’s writing – gradually loses her memory due to Alzheimer’s disease. The intimate words act in the work like an hourglass that captures within it a precious and limited time: words as a tool for bearing witness. Words as the last weapon in the fight against forgetting. Words as the ultimate roadmap for preserving personal memory at all costs. Almost every day, the author visits her friend, and weaves written fragments – "homeopathic", microcosmic – that cling to each other in tiny chapters, and then unite into a complete and organic work. However, "Second First Person" is the kind of work that is difficult to catalog: shades, intersecting thoughts, changing times alongside maximum simplicity. Suddenly the book is read as a personal diary, then as a novella, then as an essay on time and language, or as a hymn to friendship – well, it is a unique piece of literature, full of brilliance, very moving, due to its complete lack of sentimentality. “There are no words to describe how beautiful this work is, short but intense. A text of life in the full sense of the word ‘life.’” Silvina Ferreira “This novella is a diary that insists on preserving what is being lost. Molloy invents words and sentences to prevent the death of her friend. And in this effort she creates great literature.” Juan Rivera “In situations where everything is one big forgetting, this writing, which includes the memory of love, is an opportunity to recreate memory.” Laura Ford