Ester Invernon: "You cannot love one child more than another, but you can treat them differently"

BarcelonaIt was after a conversation with her eldest son that Ester Invernon (Mataró, 1973) decided to put all her eggs in the literature basket. "He had arrived home angry with the world, totally pre-teen, and I told him: 'Many days I don't like what I do and I put up with it,'" explains Invernon. That night she couldn't stop thinking about the phrase and, the next morning, while having breakfast, she announced to her family that she had decided to change her life. "I told them that in a year I would publish a book and I got to work on it," she recalls. Thus began the career of a writer who has already brought five novels to life – including Un estiu per estimar (La Campana, 2021) and Ningú ens va dir que seria fàcil (La Campana, 2023) – and has sold over 20,000 books. Her latest story, titled Després de tu, has now arrived in bookstores, and is disconnected from the Trilogia dels Albons which has established Invernon as a successful author in Catalan.

The writer debuted with a self-published novel (later rescued by La Campana) starring women in their fifties. "It was 2019 and I had the feeling that women of that age were disappearing from the map. I wanted to reclaim that," she states. In Després de tu, there are also two characters of that age, twin sisters named Laura and Raquel, who are completely estranged. The sudden death of the former will lead Raquel to rethink her entire life, her bond with her sister, and the influence of her environment. The novel progresses through short chapters that move back and forth in time, tracing the lives of the twins in their maturity but also during their childhood and youth, when an event occurs that one of them will keep secret for years and that will mark them forever.

The central figure of her story is Núria, a mother with a complex past who has to get by alone, because the father of the protagonists abandons them. Through her, Invernon focuses on how motherhood can vary depending on the children and how, sometimes unconsciously, patterns are repeated. "I wanted to talk about the silences we have lived, especially my generation, and how they can also be considered violence. But I have tried to do it without judging the characters at any time. In the end, Núria does what she can," points out the writer, who adds that this view of motherhood moves away from her life experience. "You can't love one child more than another, and that's something I repeat often. But you can treat them differently, because they are different people," she emphasizes.

Breaking with patterns

The novel is based on two great sentiments shared by the characters: guilt and shame. As the story delves into Raquel's inner life, she realizes she is the black sheep of the family and that her role will be to break away from the pattern inherited from generation to generation. She will do so after convincing her mother to go to a psychologist together. "I wanted to address how there is still a very strong stigma regarding mental health. For many people, going to a psychologist is still a cause for shame, but I believe that as people, we always have things to work on, until the day we die," says Invernon, who emphasizes that forgiveness is one of the elements typical of her novels.

Invernon's life change came when she, precisely, was also approaching fifty, which was when she left the job she had dedicated herself to for decades, in a company in the fashion sector where she was in charge of commercial and production tasks, and she devoted herself to writing and to ensuring her books had a trajectory. "In the end, I come from the business world. I am an author and I am a seller. From my previous experience, the biggest lesson I have learned is that you have to work as a team and that, where you cannot reach, find someone to help you," she highlights. Following this idea, before self-publishing her first book, she took a writing workshop and marketing classes and hired editors and people to provide her with an editorial report.

Once the book was out, she sent copies to various "bookstagrammer" profiles (book influencers), who gave the novel a good boost. "They helped me enormously and I managed to make the book work, also thanks to word-of-mouth," explains Invernon. She has now achieved a visibility she didn't have before, but she continues to strive to get her novels to as many readers as possible. "I run advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram and I also create videos with the help of the publisher. I invest to sell more; and it always pays off. There will come a point when I won't need to, but for now I still have to do it — the writer emphasizes—. The most important thing is not to leave the new releases table at the bookstore, and that is very difficult with the quantity of books published nowadays. But, if you go from the table to the shelf, you are already almost dead".