The writer who has triumphed thanks to internet addiction

Barcelona"Thank you for inviting me. I know how you are with tourists. I appreciate you not throwing things at me," says the Englishwoman Sheena Patel as a joke to break the ice. We are at the presentation of her first novel, Soc fan, at La Central de Consell de Cent. The writer really knows how to deliver opening lines, because her novel's is: "I stalk a woman on the internet who is sleeping with the same man as me". Bang. "I'd give anything for a joke," she'll confess later, which is another good barra.

Journalist Andrea Gumes — who, by the way, we know TV3 has offered to present the book program Tot el temps del món and leave Nervi: here we have scoops for the section's followers— tells us about "the earthquake" that the publication of that novel caused in 2022 in the United Kingdom, an expanding wave that led to it being translated into Spanish in 2023 (Alpha Decay) and now into Catalan (translated by Elena Ordeig Vila) by the young publishing house Jande, which publishes migrant and racialized voices. The author is grateful that a book written during the pandemic from her bed is still alive because, "in literary terms, in the UK it's as if it had been published five hundred years ago." The soufflé has deflated: "All the attention has gone and I'm back to being just me. Something has changed, the awareness, maybe the access to the publishing sector if I needed it. But I'm not Sally Rooney, no one is killing themselves to publish my shopping list." And she confesses: "Receiving attention is very cool, it's like doing a line of coke every day, which doesn't mean I know what it feels like. But it's not like winning a million dollars a day, it's more normal. Now I have to prove again that I can write another book".

The protagonist of Soc fan —"a woman in her thirties, daughter of precarious immigrants within the erratic, intense, consented, mistaken cultural world", Gumes will guide us— is obsessed with her lover's partner, a trio to whom the author gives no name. It all started with the particular obsession that Patel developed. "Trump is my muse" —she jokes—. "I saw the January 6th [2021] Capitol assault and I said: 'It's like an acid trip.' It was a technicolor nightmare," she recalls. Her idea was to portray precisely a contemporary obsession but from a very ordinary place, where everyone could feel identified. The other great attraction of the book is that it exposes these dirty secrets: "I'm interested in Jungian psychology, the idea of shameful behavior that we wouldn't tell anyone, and bringing that to light." The protagonist virtually pursues the other woman, which is pathetic, but he has an "online presence that contradicts what he does in the shadows, where he has a secret relationship: what is more miserable? The author believes that the internet, thanks to which she began to write and which feeds her literature with images and memes, can also "give you power and power reveals who you truly are, for better or for worse, because it is very easy to be benevolent and behave well if you don't have power".

Being indulgent with difficult characters

Sheena Patel admits that perhaps the protagonist is not easy, nor is she liked all the time, but she feels that racialized characters are judged more harshly and she wanted to do the opposite: be lenient with the girl's character and bad decisions, as happens in English comedies. "After all, it's like a bad episode in someone's life. There are always years that seem to last a decade," she says.

The author, who is so funny she seems like a comedian, and in fact they seem like a duet with her interpreter, Marta Armengol, who really embodies her as if they were Siamese twins, already has another project in hand. "I don't need to write a book, there are already many. That doesn't mean I don't want to. I tell myself that the writing process is important, because I love to think, it's very fun. At first I thought I was a genius and now I don't know, because I've struggled to write something and I can't do it. And it's frustrating because I want them to pay attention to me again".