Writer Carme Riera: "It was very difficult for me to learn to read"

Carme Riera (Palma de Mallorca, 1948) is a writer and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Winner of the National Narrative Prize, the Josep Pla Prize, the Crexells Prize, and the Lletra d'Or Prize, among others, she publishes Thank you, a literary memoir of fifty years of writing.

She spent her early childhood in a large house in the center of Palma. "It was very damp. I remember the tiles covered in water, the bed soaked as if you'd stepped into the sea. On the other hand, it had a garden that I loved because you could run around and feel a bit free." The house had three floors. "Each of us had a floor: my parents lived on the ground floor, my grandmother and aunt lived on the first floor, and upstairs, on the third floor, lived my grandfather." My grandfather was quite a character: "He was very funny, he had a gym, a library, he rode his bicycle from 7 in the morning until 2, he swam in the sea whether it was summer or winter, he was quite eccentric."

Carmen is the eldest of three siblings. "I lived with my grandmother, and downstairs, my two brothers lived with my parents. My grandmother was very important to me. Upstairs with her, I felt like I was on top of the world." My grandmother was a great influence on my storytelling "because she would tell me things I don't think she'd ever told anyone, and I remember looking at her with wide eyes."

My father was a philosophy professor, and my mother, who had studied Semitic languages ​​in Barcelona, ​​"wasn't allowed to work and was a housewife." My mother was a beauty. "That marked me a lot, because when I was a child people would say: 'Oh, what a shame she doesn't look like her mother, she's the spitting image of her father.' And then I'd look in the mirror and think, 'One day I'll grow a mustache.' I had that feeling of..." the ugly girl".

Writing letters

She went to the Sagrat Cor school in Palma and was one of the last in her class to learn to read. "It was very difficult for me. The method bored me. So, do you know what I did? When they gave me a book to read, I made up what it said. And the nuns phoned home and told my mother that I couldn't make my First Communion because I was too..." delayed"Rubén Darío was the solution: "My father, during the Christmas holidays, read me the Sonatina "From Rubén Darío. And I was so amazed that I quickly decided to learn to read, and I learned with a private tutor." The effort made her ill. "I had tonsillitis, and the nuns told me to write letters to my classmates, and that's why I always say I was born into literature with a letter." ~BK_S. "As a child, I started writing poems in Spanish. And then a diary, which I've never published, from that time. But it was as a teenager that I began writing stories." She studied at the Joan Alcover Institute in Palma. "There I met the French teacher, Aina Moll, and she told me: 'These poems you write are very good, but they would be better in Catalan.' And she gave us extra Catalan classes. It was very important because it was the language change." She met her husband at the institute. "I fell in love with a teacher and married him, but of course, he was 10 years older than me." He was a physics teacher.

When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said a doctor. "Because my mother's family in Barcelona were doctors. My grandfather founded the maternity hospital. I wanted to be a psychiatrist, to hear stories, but they told me no, that girls either studied literature or nothing, and so I studied literature. When I finished my degree, my father said: now you can study medicine if you want, but I already knew I wanted to write. But I'm sorry because I think I wouldn't have done badly at it."