QUESTION. How have you coped with all these changes?
ANSWER. Actually the success of “El descontento” caught me a bit by surprise, but it was also a fairly gradual thing, because it is a book that I published in a smaller imprint within Planeta and that worked very well by word of mouth. It was little by little and my life didn’t really change because I was still doing the same thing, only that from time to time I had to do interviews or go to signings. But this really is a change overnight, I even took a leave of absence. [ríe]. It’s a very mediatic award, very popular, everybody knows about it. Even if you don’t read books, you know what the Planeta Prize is. So there is a change of everything: both economic, which allows me to have a few years of tranquility dedicated solely and exclusively to writing books, until suddenly people recognize you. The strangest day was when we did the signing in Madrid and then I went out for a few wines with my friends and three people asked me for a photo. Then it was like “wow”, I think something has changed in my life. I would define it as surreal, the truth.
P.- Being in the media spotlight, have you changed at all?
R.- What I have said, what I have opined, what I have commented is on the Internet. There are many things I have said in the podcast I have with Guillermo Alonso, that I still think exactly the same and I am not going to change my speech because of this. And I don’t notice that he is censoring me either, and I hope he doesn’t, to be honest. I was a little afraid that the publisher was expecting a decaffeinated version of me, but I haven’t had that feeling.
P.- How did you decide to start writing novels?
R.- Actually, I have been writing all my life. In fact, the decision to study journalism was because I wasn’t very clear about what I wanted to do in life, but it was clear to me that I really liked writing. So I chose a profession that allowed me to write. During my career I have taken screenwriting courses, I have always been pecking at fiction, and I have written fiction. What happened to me was that I never managed to start and finish a story until, suddenly, I committed myself to “El descontento”. It happened to me that I wrote the beginning and the end of the story appeared, then I had to go from A to Z, going through all the letters. I was very clear and very committed to wanting to finish it, to continue exploring Marisa’s psyche. There came a time when she got into my head and I started thinking about her at bedtime, as if it were happening to me. The moment I opened that door it was easier to get in and out. Once you’ve done your first novel, it’s easier to get on with the others.
P.- Is there something of you in Blanca?
R.- There is quite a lot of me because, first of all, Blanca’s childhood is very lonely and mine was lonely, for different reasons. My parents were from Madrid, but because of my father’s work I was raised in Valencia and I am an only child. I had no cousins, no uncles, no grandparents around me and at that time, in the 90s, when everyone went to eat at their grandparents’ house on Sundays, I didn’t have that. I felt quite lonely because I didn’t have that family network that other friends of mine had and that made me look for that network in non-blood ties. Which in the end is what Blanca also does, she looks for people who understand her or who treat her as part of a family without being part of her family. In that sense we are very similar.
Then the location, the neighborhood, the childhood class. We were not poor, but at the beginning we were from a more humble class. Then my father did well at work and prospered, but at the beginning I grew up in a working class neighborhood. I think that childhood in the outskirts of the city is different from growing up in the Salamanca neighborhood or even in the city center. They are different experiences and in that sense I am very much like Blanca. And then that period of adolescence when you discover that you are a woman and that the world treats you differently because you are a woman. It is also similar to the process I went through back then. Although she is much cooler than I was, because she listens to The Cure, she is gothic… Dracula, the Brönte and Frankenstein I did read, but she is cooler than me.
P.- Friendship and the passage to maturity are key themes in the novel, what have been your references?
R.- I have always liked the “coming of age” genre (initiation novels), because that experience is different, being a man or a woman. When I was in high school I was sent to read “The Catcher in the Rye”, which is a novel that is “cool”. Besides, it has a lot of mystique around it, because John Lennon’s murderer, before shooting him in the Dakota Building, was supposed to be reading it. But suddenly I arrive at the University and I read Nada, by Carmen Laforet; “Entre visillos”, by Carmen Martín Gaite; “La campana de cristal”, by Sylvia Plath; “Mujercitas”, I discover Elena Ferrante, Edna O’Brien… When I discover these women at the university talking about that period, that leap from childhood to maturity, I have the feeling that we missed it at the time. That complicit look in literature that could tell us “I’ve been through this too”.
In adolescence men discover that the world is made for them and they expand, while women shrink. We start to feel uncomfortable with our own bodies, because we begin to perceive the male gaze on us. We start to make ourselves small, to shrink, to know that our place in the world is secondary, next to men. All that inspired me a lot and it was a part I wanted to tell. More recently Alana Portero, with “La mala costumbre”, showed that the “coming of age” was not dead, that it could still be told. The experience of the passage from childhood to maturity is from many perspectives, for example the trans perspective.
P.- Would you say it’s a novel for millennials or generation Z?
R.- Actually when I’m writing I’m not thinking in these marketing terms or where this is placed in the bookstore. I wasn’t writing for millennials, what happens is that when I start thinking about a “coming of age” I have to go to my own childhood and my childhood is in the 90s. I imagine there will be many people who have lived through something similar and can identify with that.
P.- With this award you have won 200,000 euros. You said that this is enough to buy an apartment. What is this money for nowadays?
R.- I get to keep a little more than half, which is still a hell of a lot of money. I am very grateful. But the apartments in Madrid, in Valencia, in Malaga or Barcelona, you put 120,000 euros and you have a dungeon, that is to say a 30 square meter basement, where Christ lost the lighter. I am a child of the crisis and I have had many precarious jobs, I have been a waitress, I have wrapped gifts in El Corte Inglés, and I have written articles for 5 euros until they began to take me into account. It’s true that I can’t afford an apartment and it’s terrible that the housing issue is the way it is. And that even with one of the most mediatic and best paid prizes, both for the winner and the finalist, a brutal economic injection, it still does not give for many things.
P.- In the book there is a phrase that says “Internet has always been the refuge of the loneliest”, do you think it is still like that?
R.- I think it was. I think you can still be, there are still communities, but now there’s a lot of hostility. If you were a person who was lonely, you went on the Internet to connect with people who looked like you. Blanca has powers and does not understand what is happening to her, but if you think about LGTBI people, who in their environment could not comment on what was happening, on the Internet they found like-minded communities, even if they were miles away. It used to be a much friendlier Internet than it is now. It was much more intimate, we are talking about a pre-social networks Internet, an Internet of forums, of chats; an Internet that we were constantly told was very dangerous, but I think it is much more dangerous now. So yes, I think it is still the refuge of the lonely. I think that thanks to the Internet you can find people who at least live experiences similar to yours.