Pol Guasch: "There is nothing morbid or tragic about the story of my father's suicide."

Barcelona"Can I live with you again in the years we didn't share?" the narrator asks. Relic, third book that Polo Guasch (Tarragona, 1997) published by Anagrama. For the first time in his career, narrator and author coincide, and it is Pol himself who poses this question, addressed to his father. Relic It begins with the impact of his suicide on January 13, 2013, when he was only 44 years old, and from there it is his son who tries to understand an action that marked a before and after in his family. It is the first time that the author of Napalm in the heart (Anagrama, 2021) and Offered in your hands, the cream paradise (Anagrama, 2024) publicly addresses such a complex and delicate private matter, but succeeds thanks to the transformative power that good literature sometimes possesses.

You begin Relic writing: "I would have appreciated a note." The note you would have appreciated is your father's farewell. Was this the real beginning of the book?

— Yes. I remember it started at Christmas 2022. I went to spend a few days at my mother's house, the same house where I grew up with my siblings, in Tarragona. Suddenly, one night, after dinner or whatever, I started writing and this came out. It was a moment when I was halfway through finishing... Offered in your hands, the cream paradise And I wrote two paragraphs, almost like a diary entry. I didn't calculate anything, but I wrote them very close to the tenth anniversary of his death.

Later we read that there are three or four topics you never talk about. One of them is the loss of your father.

— Publicly, I had never touched on it, at least not explicitly, although implicitly I had, because I believe that Relic It is a book that helps me understand or shed light on some of the issues from previous books, such as family, the absence of a father, or the complicated relationship with inheritance.

That "absence of a father" ended in suicide. Before we begin Relic Had you ever considered writing something about your father?

— It's fortunate he didn't, because at that point it would have been a book solely about my story. I started it ten years after his death, without planning it. At home, his father's suicide has never been a taboo or a secret. In fact, we lived through the years of his illness very directly, with everything it entailed, and finally his death. He wasn't buried in the family memory, so when I started writing Relic It wasn't to settle scores or to enlighten a person who had withdrawn from my life.

What was the intention, then?

— The desire to experience for the first time everything that happened in a complete narrative. We never knew what mental illness she suffered from, but she suffered greatly. We experienced the suicide and what came after in a disjointed way; we couldn't make sense of it. Annie Ernaux She says, and I completely agree, that she truly experiences things when she writes them. It is for all these reasons that Relic It is not a book written from the need to grieve or to turn the page, but rather a book of understanding.

There's a passage toward the end of the book where you discuss all the possibilities that can lead someone to commit suicide. To write this section, you quote a lengthy article your father wrote when he was a prison officer.

— For a long time I didn't know that text existed. I discovered it by searching my father's name online. I thought nothing would come up, and then I stumbled across this. It was published by the prison magazine, or the bar association, because he, as a lawyer, had been a member.

Mention a classic in suicide studies, Émile Durkheim, who spoke of the suicidal person as a victim of social conditions. Also Sigmund Freud"It's as if you were offering me the tools to understand that those who commit suicide may do so in order to understand," you write.

— There is a sociological perspective on suicide, the predominant one today, that links the malaise of capitalism and the socioeconomic system to mental illness and suicide. This interpretation explains some of these deaths, but I believe it overlooks a detail that has existed since the dawn of humanity: the unease some people feel with life, or that profound loneliness my father experienced, his deeply melancholic gaze, the sense that the past always haunted him and that he could never truly come to terms with what had happened. Events weighed heavily on him without a clear explanation for why they were the way they were.

The book revolves around the implications of his malaise, while also featuring a number of writers who made the same radical decision as him, such as John Kennedy Toole, Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace and Anne Sexton.

— Trying to understand and resolve suicide through a single story seems like a mistake to me. Approaching suicide through literature, which is inherently mysterious and imprecise, but never totalitarian, can give us more answers than we think.

His most difficult period began when he was 40 years old, didn't it?

— Yes. I tried to pinpoint the original moment of the transformation, when my father began to change and life became extremely difficult. There are key moments, like the deaths of his father and mother, but at the same time, I think something must have happened to him during his childhood. I'm a bit Freudian in this sense, because I believe that the silences, pains, and wounds of childhood haunt you for life. I finish the book feeling one thing: suicide was the only option my father had. When we talk about someone who commits suicide, we tend to say they chose their fate, and obviously there are deeply calculated, premeditated suicides, where at least the sense of choice exists, but there are many other suicides that are the consequence of a long journey where there was no alternative, no way out. I think this was the case with my father.

He died when you were in your early teens, shortly after you turned 15. Before he started getting sick, did you have a happy childhood?

— I remember my wonderful childhood years, spent with my siblings, my mother, and my father. We did many things. We traveled often.

Both my siblings and my mother appear frequently in the book. So do my grandparents, a friend, and even a former partner. There's more life than death.

— My intention wasn't to write about abandonment, but to narrate the fading of a presence. I didn't want to write a book about trauma, survival, and failure, but rather about how, at its core, there is a presence that gradually fades until it disappears completely. There is nothing morbid or tragic about my father's suicide.

During the writing process, you told your mother and siblings.

— They were the first to read it, and I asked them if they agreed with what I had written. In the end, it's my perspective on the story, and they can agree with it or not. They could even have asked me not to publish it.

Even so, your mother told you that you were brave "to expose yourself like that" in a book. You wonder if you want to "feel brave or just lighthearted." What do you mean?

— It's the ease of appropriating a story you're not sure is yours, a story you've never experienced as your own. When someone fades away like that, with those absences and complex griefs, those slow, agonizing deaths, it's incredibly difficult to experience it as something that's happening to you. You hear everything, except understanding. And understanding is fundamental to well-being in life.

I'm sure you'll be asked about this in more than one interview. Relic, about whether writing this book has helped you personally.

— We must dismantle this narrative that says if a piece of literature has been therapeutic for someone, it can't be considered high literature. Writing can provide transformative experiences. The writer Marcos Giralt Torrente asks, "When we write, who isn't looking for a reward?" And he's not referring to recognition, success, or sales, but to a greater sense of understanding about the issues that concern you. This has happened to me recently, and it also happened with... Napalm in the heart and with Offered in your hands, the cream paradiseThey helped me understand things about family, desire, abandonment, and sadness. The transformation they brought about in me Relic It becomes evident in the book itself.

Has the writing process been more difficult than writing novels?

— I've spent three years with my father very much on my mind, invoking him through my writing and thinking about him, perhaps not every day, but certainly daily. During all this time, I've summoned an absence in a very powerful, literal, and constant way. There's a part of me—and I'm still thinking about this—I don't know if it's a very assertive, direct, or convinced statement—a part that thinks perhaps it's best to leave the dead in peace: stories of absence are painful because they are ghostly, and that hurts a lot. But turning them into fixed, written stories betrays that spectral feeling of absence somewhat. It might generate movements that I can't yet describe, because the book hasn't been published.

You've given it a literary form from the very first paragraph.

— Yes, 100%.

You wonder, for example, if you have arranged everything you explain in a way that is closer to fiction than to real experience.

— Yes. On the one hand, I've tried to make the book's form reflect the imprecise nature of memories. They appear when they fly by, and you don't know why, but there are three or four moments from childhood that always return, and deep down, they aren't the most relevant. This disorder coexists with another very important element, which is this: I've heard that writing Relic I was reclaiming tools I had learned writing fiction. Right now, I can't separate writing, any kind of writing, from a certain feeling of creation. Even when I write a journal entry, the same thing happens.

It's not about publishing or making it known, but about how you deal with it.

— Exactly. I hope my newspapers are never published. I would feel terrible. Even so, when I write to them, I don't consider them merely personal notes. There are other authors who have had the same experience. I'm thinking of the letters of Marina Tsvetaeva or Clarice Lispector, both of which are included in Relicor also those of KafkaThey are three authors I have read a lot.

One of the recurring dilemmas in the book is that of fleeing or staying. Your father ended up being one of the former. You, on the other hand, define yourself as "someone who doesn't know how to leave." Why?

— Until I wrote this sentence, I hadn't known it so clearly. I struggle with change; I need total stability in my life, and ups and downs cause me great distress. In another passage of the book, I say that for a long time I believed my father's death gave me a kind of immunity to pain. Since then, I haven't experienced another death close to home, but there have been abandonments, breakups, distance, and silences. Now I think that my father's death, so harsh and radical, hasn't given me any immunity to pain.

At that point, you define yourself in opposition to him. If, when he committed suicide, your father "broke the promise" of building a family, it seems that you intend to maintain it.

— Yes, 100%. I'm very radical about the idea of ​​fidelity, commitment, and promises, perhaps to an unnecessary degree. That relationship I have with these things probably stems from my father.

Even the first story you wrote is related to him. It was the story of a tree that felt lonely and what you did while you watched it in the garden.

— He was always in touch with the land, with manual labor and the garden. My foundational moment as a writer is connected to him, and it's no coincidence that it was born from the corner that was my bedroom. I've often found myself in a corner: at school and in high school, for example, because of issues of bullyingBeing in a corner, isolated from others, has a certain condemnation about it, but it also offers an incredible panoramic view. The image of me looking out a window at my dad perfectly describes how I've always related to writing: I've always tried to see things from the outside.

At home I had someone who wrote poems, just like you ended up doing.

— Yes, of course. My father. For years, when people asked me where my creative streak came from, I said I didn't know, and even my family said the same. But if you look closely, even though my mother was a teacher and my father a civil servant, she had and still has a very strong musical sensibility, and my father, besides writing poems, was a profoundly eloquent person. Now I believe that what I've expressed through writing has come from a family that, despite not being educated in the bourgeois sense, managed to instill in us a very strong sensibility.