Coia Valls: "I was a very invisible child"

Coia Valls (Reus, 1960) is an actress, teacher, speech therapist, and writer. In 2010, she won the Néstor Luján Prize for historical fiction with her first novel. The Jade PrincessNow he publishes the tenth one. Gaudí's dream (Compass Rose).

She studied at the Sant Josep school in Reus. "It was a convent school, and my mother started taking me there before I was old enough, at two years old, because she had to work and take care of my little sister." She was a very quiet child. "While my sister was always climbing, I was more like a little air stone. I listened, watched, played with a toy, and could spend hours doing that."

After school, she would go to her godmother's house. "I had a very special connection with my father's mother. My mother was always busy, and my godmother was a very calm person, a real peacemaker. This feeling has always stayed with me like a melody, a source of warmth, like being at home."

Near Reus they had a chicken farm. "My father traveled a lot at first; he was a salesman for some product or other. And then we started a chicken farm. He weighed the eggs and helped out wherever needed. We spent our summers there. We played with mud, pretending to buy and sell things, we went on hikes, we went to look for snails when it rained, we'd go, it would rain, we'd go looking for snails, it would rain, we'd dig, we'd pull weeds, we'd swim in a pond... We didn't go to summer camps or anything like that."

At home, Dad had an office. "It was a place absolutely forbidden to my sister and me. One day when he went out, I went in and took a book: Seven ways to kill a childAnd for a while I watched my father wondering what we had done, if we were bothering him or what. And then much later I understood the true meaning of that title.

Best friends

A sister a year and a half younger. "She was my best friend. We played a lot. She's much more outgoing, even though she's younger. I remember Mom telling me, 'Take care of your sister,' because I was the oldest. These roles are established in families. And I would say, 'But how am I supposed to take care of my sister? When I arrive, she's already...' She was much more active."

At 13, they moved to Tarragona, where her parents opened a chicken shop and an inn. "I cried, because people from Reus are very attached to Reus. The Pope even had the bell of Reus drawn in the dining room! It was a little difficult to settle into Tarragona. In fact, it's my adopted city, but home is Reus."

She discovered her passion for writing. "I didn't have many skills, nor was I competitive or athletic. So, I was kind of invisible. But since I was always writing, because I was searching for words to understand myself, my friends noticed my talent and would ask me at school to make Christmas cards, to write a letter... to study teaching. "I wanted to study psychology or special education, but I would have had to go to Barcelona, ​​and I couldn't at the time. I thought: I'll study teaching, I'll be able to work, earn a salary, and study abroad." And when I finished my early childhood education degree, I needed to know more, so I started working with children with cerebral palsy. Meanwhile, I studied pedagogy and studied pedagogy. Forty years in public schools, thirty years working with young people with deafness and serious disabilities.

And what comes out of your childhood in your novels? "The defenseless girl, that capacity for isolation from the world that I had, and also the rebelliousness, at a certain point standing up and saying, enough is enough. This woman who emerges braver, who tries not to be invisible."