Yes, Netflix’s Lovesick is based on Ángeles Mastretta’s novel Mal de amores. The seven-episode Mexican series keeps Emilia Sauri, her ambition to practise medicine, the competing futures represented by Daniel Cuenca and Antonio Zavalza, and a country moving towards revolution. Its route to the screen is unusually personal: the adaptation is directed by Mastretta’s daughter, Catalina Aguilar Mastretta.
What is the Mal de amores novel about?
Mastretta’s novel follows Emilia Sauri, the daughter of a liberal family in Puebla, through Mexico’s political and social upheaval at the beginning of the twentieth century. Emilia falls in love with two men while pursuing a medical career that women of her time were rarely allowed to enter.
Daniel belongs to the movement and danger of revolutionary politics. Antonio offers a life connected to medicine and greater stability. Yet Emilia is not written merely as the prize between them. Her profession, family inheritance and right to define love on her own terms are part of the same struggle.
The novel received the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 1997. That literary background matters because Netflix is adapting more than a period romance: the original story binds one family’s emotional life to dictatorship, the 1910 uprising and the internal battles that followed the revolution.
Why Catalina Aguilar Mastretta was the natural director
Catalina Aguilar Mastretta read her mother’s novel when she was 12 and wanted to adapt it long before the Netflix series existed. Members of the cast have said that other producers approached Ángeles Mastretta for the rights, but the author kept the story for the daughter who hoped to direct it.
The family connection did not keep the novelist at a ceremonial distance. Ángeles Mastretta visited the set, while the actors spent time with her away from filming. Renata Vaca described meals and conversations about music, politics and everyday life that helped the ensemble understand the world of the Sauri and Cuenca families.
What does the Netflix adaptation keep from the book?
- Emilia’s central ambition: becoming a doctor is as important as either romance.
- The two contrasting relationships: Daniel is tied to revolutionary action, while Antonio shares Emilia’s medical world.
- The Sauri and Cuenca families: their liberal conversations shape the younger characters before the conflict reaches them directly.
- The Mexican Revolution: politics changes the characters’ choices rather than functioning as decorative period scenery.
- Several models of female freedom: Emilia’s mother, aunt and friend reveal different responses to the expectations placed on women.
Those elements explain why the adaptation cannot be reduced to the question “Daniel or Antonio?” Emilia’s real through-line is whether love can coexist with a vocation and an independent life.
What does the series change?
The clearest confirmed change is structural. The Netflix series presents events in a different narrative order from the novel and organises the story across seven episodes. That gives the screen version its own rhythm while preserving the book’s principal characters and conflicts.
Claims about specific scenes, altered deaths or a different ending need much stronger evidence than a synopsis or trailer can provide. Until the complete adaptation has been independently documented, those details should not be treated as fact. The reliable distinction is the reordered narrative, not an invented list of scene-by-scene changes.
Is Lovesick based on a true story?
No. Emilia Sauri’s story comes from Mastretta’s novel, not from a single documented biography. The historical setting is real, including the Porfirian dictatorship, the Mexican Revolution and the obstacles faced by women seeking professional education. The central family and romantic narrative is fiction set inside that history.
Should you read the novel before watching the series?
You do not need to read the book first. Netflix introduces Emilia, her families and the political fault lines as a complete screen story. Reading the novel afterwards is likely to make the differences in chronology and interior perspective easier to notice without turning the viewing experience into a checklist.
For the screen version, our spoiler-free Lovesick review looks at the adaptation’s strengths and limitations, while the Lovesick cast guide maps Emilia, Daniel, Antonio and the two central families.
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