Tatiana Tibuleac: learning to live with the poison

After the international success of The Summer the Mother Had Green Eyes, Tatiana Țîbuleac (Chisinau, Moldova, 1978) returns to explore family ties, in which love and violence coexist in a natural way. In When You Are Happy, Attack First –translated into Catalan by Corina Oproae–, happiness is not a promise of fulfillment, but a threat that must be neutralized before it leaves you defenseless. The title functions as the law of the strongest.

Mila, a fifty-year-old Moldovan woman settled in Paris, has been sober for six months and earns a living caring for the elderly. Precariousness and loneliness mark an existence far from the expectations with which she emigrated. Distance has not freed her from the past: her childhood, absences, and, above all, the relationship with her father determine her way of loving and facing losses. Changing countries does not equate to starting from scratch; there are wounds that cross borders.

Țîbuleac avoids turning the protagonist into an exemplary victim. Mila is contradictory, uncomfortable, capable of offering both tenderness and cruelty, with a harsh humor that avoids turning pain into sentimental spectacle. The paternal figure concentrates a good part of this tension. A journalist, writer, alcoholic, and charismatic, the father fascinates others, but emotionally abandons Mila. He transmits his love for books to her without knowing how to give her what she needs. His death does not resolve the bond: it transforms it into a presence that memory keeps active. Mila admires him and reproaches him for the harm he has done to her; between devotion and resentment, she tries to understand what she has inherited from him and how it has conditioned her life.

An unequal friendship

Mila's friendship with another woman adds a new contradiction. Both start from a similar point, but end up in opposite situations: while one achieves economic stability, the other lives in a precariousness that threatens to drag her down. But Mila does not break the bond. She is held by a fascination that prevails over reasoning, because relationships are not always governed by convenience or reciprocity. Țîbuleac portrays a friendship crossed by inequality and dependency, far from any idealization of sisterhood.

When you are happy, attack first is inscribed in a markedly feminine literature, as much for the themes it addresses as for the centrality of affective relationships and women's experiences. This perspective provides nuances to bonds often explained from the outside, but it also carries a risk: that emotional intensity ends up taking the place of complexity and that the story insists too much on the characters' wounds. When introspection becomes the main narrative engine, the outside world can be reduced to a simple stage for intimate conflict.

The individual story reflects the fractures of a generation of women from Eastern Europe who, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, left to seek a better future and encountered precariousness and violence. Mila is conditioned by circumstances that limit the freedom of choice. Despite her training, she ends up trapped in jobs that do not correspond to her abilities and in an unstable life. Țîbuleac questions the idea that individual effort guarantees a better life: emigrating can open a door, but it does not ensure the right to walk through it with dignity.

Țîbuleac's prose combines harshness and sensitivity without turning suffering into a lesson. The past erupts into the present because it still conditions it, and memory offers no automatic healing: understanding where wounds come from does not mean knowing how to close them. Happiness, in this universe, is almost a provocation. When you have learned to defend yourself from pain, trusting in what you love can be more terrifying than losing it. Attacking first is pretending that you control something, but also revealing to what extent you are afraid. Sometimes, so as not to suffer again, we are the first to cause harm. And it is in this paradox that Țîbuleac finds the uncomfortable truth of her characters.