Memories of My Melancholy Whores

That's the title of a recent novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It is the story of a 90-year-old man who, on his birthday, decided to have a night of wild sex with a young virgin. He phoned his local brothel and requested one. So it goes on from there.

Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1982, probably the year I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude. One Hundred Years had so transported me that for the next ten years, I sought out and read everything that Marquez wrote. It's now been at least 15 years since I read him.

To date, if you asked me who my favourite author is, I would say Marquez. Not only because he tells great stories, but because in my twenties when I was lost, his stories illustrated for me lives of possibility and passion. The possibility was magical, the passion real. Magical realism was concrete for me even as the literary genre was quite abstract. His world flicked on bright, intelligent and passionate, magically imbuing mine with the same as I was trying to create it.

Oprah put One Hundred Years on her book list a couple of years ago. But I have been afraid to re-read Marquez. I fear a second read would take away from the life-changing impact of the first. And then I saw Memories of My Melancholy Whores this week. Published in 2004, it's Marquez's first work of fiction in ten years.

I have changed much in the last 15 years. Has Marquez the writer changed? In some ways, I feel Marquez mentored me. How have I conducted my life with the transformative power he gave me through his books? How would I now respond to his stories as an adult, a woman, wife, mother, daughter, sister, friend, neighbour?

I shall find out.