In Lo que queda de mí: Lo más difícil no es cambiar, es atreverse a ser (What’s Left of Me: The Hardest Thing Is Not to Change, It's to Dare to Be), Spanish actress Karla Sofía Gascón doesn’t just continue her story, she tears the veil off it. This searing, unsparing memoir is both a follow-up and a counterpoint to her 2018 autobiographical novel Karsia. Una historia extraordinaria (Karsia. An Extraordinary Story), written under her former name, Carlos Gascón.
But where Karsia traced the outlines of her transition, Lo que queda de mí dives into the abyss, unflinching, raw, and deeply human.
From the first lines, “A body suspended in the void. A final breath. A moment where time fragments and the mind retraces the paths that led it there”, Gascón’s prose sets the tone: visceral, immediate, and unapologetically personal. This is not a celebrity tell-all, nor a curated victory lap. This is a descent into the wounded core of being. It is, in her own words, “not just a story; it’s a strangled cry, a confession without filters.”
Karla Sofía Gascón has lived many lives, actor, public figure, immigrant, trans woman, controversy magnet, Cannes winner. And yet, she begins Lo que queda de mí not with triumph, but with fragility. That suspended body isn’t just metaphor. It’s the image of a person fractured by years of self-denial, survival, and social performance. “How much of our existence is just an act?” she asks. “And what happens when the curtain finally falls?”
While Karsia introduced the public to her gender transition, Lo que queda de mí interrogates what it means to exist beyond the binary of male and female, fame and shame, strength and vulnerability. It’s a literary act of deconstruction, built with the sharp tools of memory, reflection, and pain.
The book doesn’t follow a straight timeline. Instead, it spirals through years, childhood in Alcobendas, life on Spanish and Mexican television, the claustrophobic rituals of masculine expectation, her arrival in Hollywood, and her eventual emergence into global stardom with Emilia Pérez (2024), where she portrayed a narco boss seeking redemption and gender freedom. It’s a poetic irony: an actress once forced to perform gender is now recognized worldwide for playing a character doing exactly the same.
There’s no attempt to excuse her past, but neither does she martyr herself. Instead, she questions the very nature of being human in public: What does it mean to grow when the world wants you to be fully formed?
Lo que queda de mí is not a traditional memoir. It refuses the neat arcs of resolution. Karla Sofía Gascón doesn’t present herself as an inspirational figure. She is wounded, angry, tender, funny, and sometimes cruel. The strength of her writing lies in its contradictions. Her prose is razor-sharp and lyrical; she cuts herself open on every page.
There are moments of startling beauty, descriptions of first love, the pain of motherhood lost, the comfort of a new name spoken with tenderness. But there are also moments of brutal confrontation: with herself, with the people who betrayed her, and with the world that forced her to wear masks until her face was unrecognizable, even to her.
Lo que queda de mí isn’t easy. It wasn’t meant to be. It’s a wound that speaks, a scar that still burns, and a truth that demands to be heard, even if it makes you uncomfortable. It is as much about societal injustice as it is about personal responsibility. As much about failure as it is about becoming.
In a cultural moment saturated with performative allyship and curated vulnerability, Karla Sofía Gascón gives us something rare: unedited existence. And in doing so, she delivers a profound literary accomplishment, one that will linger with readers long after the final page.
Not because she dared to change.
But because she dared to be.
Available via Amazon
Photos via Instagram.
Post a Comment