With My Dog Eyes

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For many years toward the end of her life, Hilda Hilst spent every evening getting drunk on cheap whiskey, drunk to the point of not remembering the things she said or the fights she provoked. “I drink because it’s the only way I can tolerate reality,” she told a close friend and longtime resident of the Casa do Sol (The House of the Sun), the secluded estate where she lived and wrote for nearly forty years. There, surrounded by a rotating cast of friends, bohemian artists and poets, and a pack of dogs sometimes numbering more than one hundred, Hilda Hilst produced one of the most ambitious and original bodies of work in Latin American literary history.

Hilst had been born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Brazil, an heiress to the lands, if not the fortunes, of a São Paulo coffee dynasty. Her father, Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst, was a writer as well as a coffee baron. Hilst revered her father, and throughout her life attributed her prodigious literary talent to him. Unfortunately, mental illness also ran in the family for generations, and Hilst’s father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia shortly after her parents separated, when she was only two years old. Her mother also later suffered from dementia, and ended up confined in the same sanatorium to which her father had been committed years before. The specter of madness would loom over Hilst’s entire career as a writer, inflecting her work with themes of insanity and contributing to her formidable reputation as an eccentric recluse.

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