These days that means doing a lot of interviews. Again I note that there is a question that I am asked again and again, even often it is not a question but something that the journalist takes for granted: that the . A couple, for example, have pointed out to me that Ramona’s vowels are the same as Carlota’s, something that hadn’t even occurred to me.
Beyond whether or not you have an interest in knowing to what extent the author is in his texts (I think you shouldn’t have any: what is needed is for the text to work, although I understand that there is a certain morbidness or voyeurism inherent in the fact of reading what someone else has written), beyond the fact that inevitably all authors are always in some way in their texts for the simple reason that we cannot write from a person who is not us and, therefore, what we write is always contaminated with our view of the world, with our logic about the psychology of people, etc., beyond all this, what really worries me is that this permanent obsession to identify author with character happens especially with women writers. These days I have read, for example, interviews with Eva Baltasar in which she is repeatedly asked about the subject. It wouldn’t cost anything to find dozens of examples. Not so with writers.
Ruminating on all this, I asked him, who is the closest example to me, if he is usually asked about this identification between character and author, and he said never. I, who obviously know him and read him, see obviously that his main characters have a lot of him, for example the boy ofThe day of the whale or the Simó of The man who sold the worldbut no one has ever thought to ask him about the similarities or the curious coincidence of vowels (in Mallorca they call the Melciors Sion, a name similar enough to Simó, right?).
Just today in an interview I was asked about autofiction; to consider that a novel like autofiction seems to me delusional. What’s behind this obsession to pigeonhole female autofiction writers where none exist, to identify them with their female characters? Well I think what’s there is a disgusting thing: the old idea that women can only write about intimacy and domestic life, about what we know, the idea that women’s imaginations are limited and short-sighted, not like men’s, which are fruitful and varied and really interesting. he was already talking about the unconscious assumptions that make us generate certain expectations about women writers: “If we look beyond the numbers and look at the content, we will see that white men are still the experts, the objective and universal voice of reason. […] Women are asked to write about their feelings, or work-life balance, or domestic issues.” And if they don’t write about it, what we do is continue to impose that reading on them.
