This paper focuses on the ways of construction of grief due to someone's loss of a female friend in El desperdicio (2007) by Matilde Sánchez. Our starting point is Derrida's idea that funerary discourse deals with life and is built at the crossroads between fact and fiction. Composed as an elegy, the account creates the memory of the dead friend through a biographic evocation. It moves forward as Argentina's polítical course does and it is narrated as an integral part of it, since the narrator assumes that a name goes along with an age.This memory spans three decades of the character's life and ends with her death in 2001. In that same year, political, economic and social collapse devastated the country.
grief; female friend; biography; memory; name