There is a woman at the end of the street whom everyone calls La Peluca: the Wig. She lives alone, wears makeup that does not quite stay within its intended lines, and has acquired the neighborhood reputation of a witch. Even men who usually make a point of being loud become conspicuously polite when she passes.

A child likes seeing her. Something about the old woman’s imperfect makeup recalls the child’s own experiments, carried out hurriedly in her grandmother’s bathroom. The neighborhood sees an alarming spectacle. The child sees something familiar.

That small disagreement about whom to approach is a good place to meet Alana S. Portero’s Bad Habit. Its unnamed narrator is a trans girl growing up in working-class Madrid. An adult voice takes us back through her childhood, before she has a safe way to explain herself, when attraction and fear can arrive long before the words that might make them intelligible.

The novel was first published in Spanish as La mala costumbre in 2023. English readers can find it in Mara Faye Lethem’s translation, Bad Habit. It moves through the Madrid of the 1980s and 1990s, from the San Blas neighborhood toward the nightlife of the city center. But there is no need to rush the journey. What happens on this one street already makes it difficult to accept the usual story about a child learning to fit in.

Who would she have to stop noticing in order to fit? What would she have to learn to dislike?

A neighborhood that knows too much

The Spanish opening provided by the publisher begins before La Peluca’s appearance, with a death. The narrator is not yet six when she encounters a neighbor, Efrén, dead at his own doorway. A child cannot put the circumstances into a complete account of addiction and social neglect. The body and the grief of the adults arrive without waiting for that account.

So this is not a childhood whose safety is shattered only when the protagonist discovers that she is different. Danger is already woven into the place where she plays. The neighborhood is intimate enough for other people’s losses to enter her memory.

Portero gives the streets a physical presence: red brick, outside stairs, the gaps between buildings where children find space to play. These are not neutral pieces of scenery. They determine who sees whom, where a person can disappear for a moment, and how difficult it may be to keep anything private. Being known by everyone can mean that help is nearby. It can also mean that everyone feels entitled to decide what you are.

There is comedy here, too. La Peluca’s passage changes the behavior of the men around her. Their toughness suddenly has limits. For the child watching, a person everyone treats as an object of ridicule or alarm can also possess an unexpected authority.

The scene is more interesting than a simple reversal in which the outcast turns out to be wise and the neighborhood turns out to be wrong. La Peluca does not step forward to deliver a lesson. She remains an old woman going about her life. The child’s attachment is not yet a friendship, much less a settled understanding of who this woman is.

That incompleteness matters. Someone can become important to us before knowing that we have noticed them. A face seen on the street can offer a possibility that the people who love us have not managed to make available.

In her conversation with Eva Blanco Medina, Portero resists a nostalgic picture of working-class solidarity. Neighbors can share what little they have and still be unable to prevent terrible harm. Affection for a place does not oblige a writer to make it innocent.

That seems a useful way to approach San Blas: with room for both the attachment and the wish to get away. Poverty is not ennobling scenery, but neither does it drain the people who live there of wit, taste, or the ability to surprise one another.

A pleasure she cannot bring outside

The bathroom makeup is an experiment before it is an explanation. A hand has to learn what to do. There is excitement in trying, and urgency in knowing that the attempt cannot safely continue for very long.

It is easy to describe a childhood like this entirely through prohibition. Yet doing so misses something crucial: the child wants something. She is not merely avoiding punishment. She is discovering a pleasure, a likeness, a way of looking at herself that she would like to keep.

The trouble is that pleasure itself has to be concealed. If a child hears the adults around her turn people like her into jokes, she does not need to be personally confronted to learn the rule. She may begin hiding her delight before she can explain why she is delighted.

Portero discusses this absence of generous language in the Vogue interview. The problem is not just that a correct term has yet to be supplied. The available words may make a life seem ridiculous or shameful before a child has had a chance to imagine living it.

A label, however accurate, cannot by itself provide the company she needs. There is a difference between being able to name yourself and having someone with whom you can share an ordinary, happy hour. The first does not automatically produce the second.

La Peluca’s uneven makeup offers a much smaller kind of opening. No one is granting the child permission; no one has even understood what she needs. She has simply seen something that makes her feel less alone. The scene asks us to take that experience seriously without enlarging it into a rescue.

As the narrator grows older, the city center offers other encounters and other ways to be visible. But an address is not a guarantee. The wish to be wanted can make a person vulnerable at the same time that it draws her toward a less hidden life.

This is why a map divided into an oppressive neighborhood and a liberated center would be too simple for the premise. People make places safer, or fail to. Trust has to be learned in particular relationships. The novel’s account of those relationships is something to leave for the reader, rather than convert into a list of milestones.

Nor should the older women who enter this world be treated as a collection of role models with one job: helping the protagonist grow. They have histories and desires of their own. The possibility of recognizing yourself in someone else does not mean that you must become her.

A voice that will not stay quiet

The opening does not offer the spare, transparent language a reader might expect from a retrospective coming-of-age story. Bodies and streets acquire religious and mythic associations. An ordinary woman can be surrounded by the atmosphere of a witch story without the book requiring us to believe that she performs literal magic.

The distinction is worth keeping. What a child hears, what a neighborhood repeats, and what an adult narrator can make of a memory are not identical. Portero’s prose lets those layers touch. We are listening to someone who has acquired words for an experience that once had to be hidden.

In her interview with Daniel de la Fuente, Portero describes the intimacy first-person narration can create while insisting that the novel is not an autobiography. A voice can feel confessional because a writer has made it that way. Its closeness is not an invitation to fact-check every event against her life.

There is a useful reservation in Nadal Suau’s review for El Cultural. He values the tenderness and urgency of the voice but finds the joins between its registers uneven: poetic miniature, folklore, realism, and political argument do not always sit naturally together. Some characters’ speeches strike him as overly arranged. His admiration is not a claim that every formal choice works.

Readers who prefer restraint may therefore want to try the opening before committing to the novel. Its intensity is part of the experience, not an occasional flourish. Other readers may find that very abundance moving: someone who once lacked a way to speak now has more than one register available.

The violence also deserves a clear warning. This is not a uniformly comforting story, and there is no obligation to take its hardest material in one sitting.

Still, approaching it only as a catalogue of injuries would reproduce a different kind of confinement. The child’s pleasure in makeup, the men’s sudden good manners, the warmth or absurdity of an encounter—these are not decorative intervals between the serious events. They belong to the life at stake.

The old woman walks past. Everyone already knows what to think of her, or believes they do. The child is watching with another question. What if the person I have been told to avoid is someone I am glad exists?