Event: Service95 Book Club & Strand Present: Alana S. Portero + Mona Eltahawy - Bad Habit

This Thursday October 10, I’m thrilled to be in conversation with LGBTQIA+ activist Alana S. Portero, discussing her latest novel Bad Habit, an event co-presented with Service95 Book Club.

Service95 Book Club is where Dua Lipa shares her favourite reads from her own bookshelf, from new releases to the books she returns to again and again. Visit service95.com for more information.

This event is free to attend but you must register. It will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street at 7pm.

Can’t make the event? Purchase a signed copy of Bad Habit here.

ACCESSIBILITY:

Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at events@strandbooks.com by September 26 to request.

Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

For further information on accessibility in this space, or to make a request, please contact events@strandbooks.com

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About Bad Habit

Combining the raw realism and vulnerability of Shuggie Bain and Detransition, Baby with the poignant sensibility of Pedro Almodóvar, a staggering coming-of-age novel deeply rooted in the class struggles of a trans woman growing up in Madrid in the last decades of the twentieth century.

"I saw a whole generation of boys fall like irredeemable angels."

Told in the heartrending voice of its narrator, Bad Habit is a story of coming-of-age in working class Madrid–in a godforsaken neighborhood ironically named after a saint. Alana S. Portero's spunky protagonist struggles to make sense of herself and the world she inhabits, conveying her surroundings with mythic allusions and a poetic vitality absent from everyday life.

Set against the heroin epidemic that ravaged Madrid in the 1980s and the city’s vibrant party scene that dominated its nightlife in the 1990s, Bad Habit follows Portero’s unnamed protagonist as she grows up in a blue-collar suburb that has no place for her. Forging ahead, she discovers community and kinship in downtown Madrid, amid a lively party scene animated by junkies, pop divas, and fallen angels. But with each step she takes forward, she finds herself confronted by a violence she does not yet know how to counter; in this exciting, often terrifying, world each choice can truly be a matter of life and death.

Blistering and compassionate, Bad Habit illuminates the ties between gender and class, the search for identity, and the power of sisterhood. Shimmering in its lyrical beauty, vivid in its realism, autobiographical in its detail, it is a mesmerizing story of self-realization that speaks to the outsider in all of us.

Service95 Book Club is where Dua Lipa shares her favourite reads from her own bookshelf, from new releases to the books she returns to again and again. Each month, we travel into a different world, as Dua quizzes the author about the deeply intimate process of writing a great book. With additional features on the themes and the context of the books, and insightful questions to help you think beyond the pages, we hope you'll read the world differently with us.

Photo credit: Flor Downes

Alana S. Portero is a medieval historian, writer, playwright, LGBTQIA+ activist, and cofounder of the theatre company STRIGA. Her writings on feminism and LGBTQIA+ activism from the perspective of a trans woman have been featured in a number of international publications, including Agente provocador, elDiario.es, El Salto Diario, S Moda, and Vogue. She lives in Madrid.