My Tender Matador

My Tender Matador is a 2001 novel by Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel. Set in Santiago during the second half of 1986, the novel is a love story between a poor travesti and a leftist Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front guerrilla who participates in the attempted assassination of military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Among the characters in the novel are Pinochet himself, his wife Lucía Hiriart and Gonzalo Cáceres, then Hiriart's stylist and later a show business personality. My Tender Matador is the fourth book and only novel by Lemebel. It was published in Chile in 2001 by Seix Barral's "Biblioteca breve" collection. That same year it was also published in Spain in Anagrama's "Narrativas hispánicas" collection. Creation of the novel The novel's title, , is the verse of a song by the Spanish singer Sara Montiel (1928–2013). Moreover, within the novel, it is the watchword that the protagonists use to identify themselves. A second title that Lemebel contemplated for the novel is . As Lemebel indicates on a page at the beginning of the book, the novel emerged from twenty pages written by the author in the late 1980s. A series of acknowledgements on that page, including one "to the house" itself, hints at an autobiographical nature in the story's content.