Sophia Lima

A Redoma

Substack

Mar 2026 - Present • 4 mos

Founded and independently run A Redoma, a literary newsletter exploring the intersection of psychiatry, philosophy, and Brazilian literature — informed by my dual background as a medical student and writer. What I write about: My essays move across literature, mental health history, and philosophy of selfhood. I’ve written on Machado de Assis’s O Alienista and the history of psychiatric institutions in Brazil, on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and the literary depiction of mental illness, and on the connection between Buddhist non-self philosophy and Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. I also write book reviews (recent example: Coco Mellors’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein) and cultural essays that connect literature to broader social themes, from geopolitics to digital culture. How I write: My style is essayistic and intellectually dense but never inaccessible — I aim for prose that’s lexically rich and philosophically grounded while staying warm and personal, so readers feel invited in rather than lectured to. I ground my essays in verified sources and close reading rather than surface-level references, and I build each piece around a clear conceptual arc: an idea, image, or question that develops from opening to close, the way a well-constructed argument or a short story does. Launched and manage O Closet da Redoma, a fashion curation column within the newsletter that fuses this same essayistic voice with affiliate commerce — for instance, using Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System as a framework to write about curated product selections, turning what’s usually transactional copy into content readers actually want to read. Core competencies demonstrated: long-form essay writing, literary and cultural criticism, philosophy-informed content, brand voice development, affiliate/editorial hybrid writing, newsletter strategy, audience building.