Marta Jiménez Serrano: "It's sad to realize how easy it is to die."

BarcelonaAfter a novel and a book of short stories that turned her into a literary phenomenon, Marta Jiménez Serrano (Madrid, 1990) jumps from Sexto Piso to Alfaguara with a book about something personally traumatic. Oxygen It begins with her unconscious on the bathroom floor at home and ends when she opens her eyes. In between, a narrative intertwines the recounting of events, witness accounts, hypotheses, newspaper clippings, and legal texts, in a constant negotiation with her own privacy, without victimhood or sensationalism. "I didn't go into a coma, but almost," she writes. "This is the story of that near miss."

One of the difficulties with this book is that, as with TitanicWe know the ending. A couple is about to die from a gas leak, and the woman is you, who are here.

— Yes, one of the challenges was maintaining the tension and the pace, something like Chronicle of a Death Foretold [by Gabriel García Márquez]. I'm the protagonist and narrator of the book, and the first obstacle is that I'm the spoiler. I think that, since we know the ending, the suspense isn't what happened, but how it happened.

And the impact of having been so close to death.

— I experienced retrospective horror, and I've tried to instill that same horror in the reader. In the book, I say something like: "When the danger ended, the fear began."

"Our near-death was the best kind of death: slowly falling asleep holding hands," you write. That's why they call it 'sweet death.' It would sound nice if you weren't 30 years old.

— We have this narrative about when we should die. We all understand that at some point it has to end, but that it should be as late as possible, painless, and so on. All of this stems from a false sense of control over things we don't actually control: no matter how advanced medicine is or how obsessed we are with youth, it will happen.

What drives you to write more, fear or anger?

— Many things. I'm driven by the need to process this trauma; of course, there's also indignation and anger, and also gratitude to the emergency services, to the people who got me out of there, even to my psychologist.

It took years of therapy until I finally cried. Does this book delve deeper into healing? I don't know if promoting it will be difficult.

— I didn't think I'd be able to do it, that there wouldn't be any promotion, and yet it's turning out to be the icing on the cake. I think writing and therapy have something in common, which is verbalizing what's happening to us, but it's another thing entirely to have someone actually listen to you. And this is proving to be somewhat healing. When I wrote that scene you describe, I understood what the book was about.

It's a duel.

— It's a realization that we will die, something that wouldn't be painful if it weren't for the fact that for a while we thought we would never die. It's a grief for that little girl who believed she was immortal, who got on the roller coaster and didn't think, "I hope they tightened all the snails properly."

When do you become aware of your hypochondria?

— I don't know, it's gradual, but it has a lot to do with that moment when you start taking care of yourself. When you're a child, if you have a wound or a problem, Mom will notice it when she's bathing you. When you're the one who has to realize it, a level of awareness and a misunderstood sense of responsibility kicks in, let's say. It's not that what happened to me triggered my anxiety; I think we're all born with certain predispositions. What happened is that it amplified my fears.

You suggest that perhaps the same mechanism that triggers your hypochondria is, in some way, what makes you a writer.

— The ability to fantasize and project can take us to so many places; it can lead us to imagine the worst-case scenario, to tell stories, to create literature, and it can even make us lose our minds. Our most universal book is about a guy who loses his mind and starts confusing fantasy with reality, right? I think our relationship with reality and fantasy defines us a lot.

I've had the feeling that surviving trauma gives you a perspective on what the world would be like without you. For the people around you, everything goes on as usual. There's a sense of "it was nothing."

— Everything is nothing Compared to death, I'm sure that if I'd spent four years in rehab, everyone would have asked me, "How are you?", "Can you move your elbow?", but because I'm the psychologist, no one ever asks again. Now that you mention it, this perspective of how everything would have been if I hadn't been there, I think, is what made me experience what was coming as a gift. Wow, I've just published my first novel! Suddenly, it's all a blessing.

How does the will to live return after trauma?

— Little by little. At first, I didn't feel like doing anything; there's something depressing about it. It's sad to realize how easy it is to die. Then, I went from sadness to panic. And I ended up sorting it out a bit through the therapy process I describe in the book. I felt like a child again; I had to learn to sleep: I had to start eating better, always having dinner at the same time, establishing routines, extracurricular activities at a certain time—suddenly, it was like being back in school.

Precariousness and the housing crisis are also at the root of the problem.

— Absolutely. What happened to me is a perfect, concrete symbol of this situation. Of landlords who don't take responsibility for their properties, of the depersonalization... I wanted to explain the housing problem from the characters' personal perspectives, to the point that you could die if someone doesn't take care of their apartment. This led me to reflect on the notion of home today: what does it mean to belong to a place and how do we relate to the space we inhabit? You don't relate to it the same way if you've already moved eleven times by the age of 30, if every piece of furniture is temporary; it's impossible to have a sense of belonging under these circumstances.

I found it funny how you portray your anti-heroine, the landlady, a rich woman living in the United States who wants nothing to do with her apartment.

— That character was incredibly difficult for me, because she was like a Marvel villain. If I'd invented her, I would have done it differently, but that's just how it was. I didn't want to give her any shades of gray, to humanize her: I hate this woman. I wanted to portray the typical mean person, because they exist, bad, irresponsible, shallow people. There are fictional characters more complex than real people.

It's a pivotal book, set when you're 30, when you begin your literary career and start a love story.

— From one book to the next, there's always a seed planted, and this couple's story could have turned out to be... Not everyoneIt's true that the book portrays the transition to your 30s, when life starts to get more serious. Your 20s are the decade for experimenting, and in your 30s you make more mature decisions about relationships, you lose some friends with whom you no longer have as much in common, and your professional life changes. I don't intend to create a generational portrait, but it's true that I'm interested in the world I live in because I use books to understand it, to connect with it. It's natural that people of my generation would identify with it.

I read on the book's band: "The great revelation of Spanish literature." How are you handling the expectations?

With joy, truly. I don't take on any expectations. I was curious to see how this book, which is different from my previous ones, would be received. And I feel very fortunate because I feel I have a community of readers with whom I have a dialogue. I feel supported.