He Wednesday 29 April to 19:00h, The Fnac València Forum hosts the presentation of The work, the forceful narrative debut of Marina Pereda, who will be present to dialogue with the public about a book that has become one of the most lucid and personal testimonies about the internal functioning of Opus Dei from direct experience.
The work is presented as a non-fiction initiation story narrative, built in first person, in which the author reconstructs more than two decades of life within the organization founded by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer. Far from offering a settling of accounts or a pamphletary text, Marina Pereda opts for an intimate narrative, precise and deeply human, capable of showing how the control dynamics, Obedience and sacrifice are integrated into everyday life until they become invisible to those who live them from within..
The protagonist—Marina herself—grows up with a role assigned to her from a very young age.: become a saint, fulfill a divine vocation and give oneself completely to the Work. However, That supposed spiritual call soon comes into conflict with the problems of any young millennial.: Adolescence, insecurity, Labor precariousness, the search for identity, the desire to fit in and even the seemingly trivial—but symbolic—need to get Meg Ryan's exact haircut.. That tension between the sacred and the mundane runs through the entire book..
Throughout the story, Pereda describes how his personality goes splitting progressively between a real me and a I Opus, forcing her to live for years between two irreconcilable worlds. The text focuses with special force on normalized practices within the institution, like the well-known “heroic minute”, physical mortifications, control of the body and desire, exhaustive monitoring of behavior and constant monitoring of readings, movies, friendships and thoughts. All this presented not from explicit horror, but from the internal logic of a system that turns sacrifice into a virtue.
One of the great successes of The work is your application. Ironically, lucidity and contained prose, Marina Pereda portrays the psychological manipulation, he conditioning of freedom and the pressure mechanisms that especially affect girls and young people, without falling into victimhood or simplification. The text is structured in actos, like a play, reinforcing the idea that life within the Opus is lived as a constant representation: a seemingly simple role—holiness in everyday life—that ends up becoming a suffocating mask.
The presentation at Fnac València will allow us to delve deeper into the book writing process, on the emotional consequences of leaving the organization in 2013 and in the urgent need to tell these types of experiences out loud. Marina Pereda also actively participates in associations supporting victims of coercive groups., and defends the importance of making these experiences visible, not as isolated cases., but as part of a structure that deserves to be analyzed and understood.
At a time when documentaries are proliferating, journalistic investigations and public debates on closed religious institutions and power dynamics, The work brings a unique voice: that of someone who lived that system from within, with conviction, faith and obedience, and that today dares to narrate it from a critical distance, but also from compassion towards his past self.
