An interview with Gabriel Cuellar, Contributor to “Invisible”

Tiffany A. Robbins:

This is a great post from my writer friend, Gabriel Cuellar about her essay in “Invisible,” which you should totally check out!

Originally posted on Geek Girl in Love:

This summer I’ve been posting a series of interviews from people who contributed essays to the anthology Invisible.  This anthology, edited by Jim C. Hines, explores the importance of diverse representation in genre fiction.  In the essay, “‘Crazy’ about Fiction”.  We asked Gabriel why she thinks it’s so common in fiction for female characters to be ‘driven crazy’ by rape or loss of a child, and what the representation of mental illness in fiction means for people who struggle with mental illness in reality.

On common tropes about the causes of mental illness in characters:

As a culture, we tend to want women to represent as mothers and sexual objects. I believe that’s why the two most common tropes to “drive women crazy” are those rape and the loss of a child. We don’t like to see women as soldiers, so PTSD from wartime tends not to be the…

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