Empar Moliner: "When you're about to die, you can even allow yourself to be corny"

Barcelona"Writing a chronicle should be an act of freedom," Empar Moliner said towards the end of the presentation of his new novel, Instructions for living without her (Column, 2026), to the readers who listened to her with devotion this Monday evening at the Finestres bookstore. Among the audience were a man who bore a striking resemblance to Michel Houellebecq—one of Moliner's favorite authors—a former director of TV3, a handful of journalism students, and someone who exuded an intense stench of tobacco, camouflaged by the perhaps even more pervasive fragrance of chewing gum.

Shortly before beginning the conversation with Esther Vera, director of ARA, Moliner personally recommended that we write the chronicle before the event. "Let's see if it matches what actually happens," she suggested. Between freedom and invention there is a line, thin but real, that chroniclers perhaps shouldn't cross. It's always worthwhile to listen to what the author of I love you even if I've been drinking (2004), but it is necessary to know how to interpret his irony and the double meanings that always accompany him, both in and out of his books, and also in the articles he writes every day.

"Kapuściński, a master of journalists, said that the columnist has to arrive first and leave last," Moliner recalled. If the article is for the day, and Moliner is the one introducing it, the columnist must break this rule and leave at a reasonable hour. "Since I published my first book, The apartment teacher who hated pampering"In 1999, some things have changed: we work more and earn less," he said. "Other things remain the same. It was already being said that Catalan was dying. And that journalism had only four days left."

Raw, but not depressing

Empar Moliner decided to cling to literature and articles. "Everything I do is dying, but that's what's funny about it," she asserted. "If we're so sick, let them unplug us from the machine and give us a whiskey." A terminal illness is precisely the starting point of'Instructions for living without her'A novel, "raw but not depressing," in the words of Esther Vera, starring a successful and highly productive author who, after learning that her days are numbered, decides to work harder than ever to leave her family financially secure. "The novel is about a woman who was obsessed with taking care of everyone and who realizes that when she dies, she will leave her loved ones destitute," she said, before asserting that she writes novels with minimal plots: "What I like are descriptions and digressions. You can't do espoi with my books."

To hone her analytical—and even compassionate—eye, Moliner always carries a notebook. "As our friend and great popularizer Emili Teixidor used to say, 'not a day without a line,'" she admitted. "Having a notebook to write in is what saves us." Reading also saves us: "If you're a regular reader, your eyesight is sharper. You activate many more areas of the brain by reading than by looking." reels".

In the hands of Isabel Coixet, the premise ofInstructions for living without her It would be a much less dark color and leave a less bitter aftertaste than reading Moliner, whom Esther Vera has aptly compared to Dorothy Parker. "Domestic life has accompanied all my books," Moliner stated. "In literature, costumbrismo is a step below realism because it offers a more grounded perspective. That's the difference between Faulkner and Folch and Torres." Moliner is a "great defender of Folch and Torres." She detests, however, "the sentimentality of using too many paragraph breaks." "It's like when the pace slows down in a crucial scene in a TV movie, so you notice," she says. "Your literature is more harsh than sentimental," Vera asserted. "I suppose so," the author replied. "But when you're about to die, you can even allow yourself to be sentimental."