Estel Solé: “I changed the year with a dead creature inside”

BarcelonaDuring confinement, Estel Solé (Molins de Rei, 1987) began to imagine the story of Lena, a woman overwhelmed by her family and professional life who suffers two small tragedies and decides to leave her with a stranger. Scraping together hours of sleep and juggling work-life balance, Solé turned that idea into a novel and, in an impulse of "absolute unconsciousness", submitted it to the Ramon Llull prize. The actress and writer, creator of shows such as Pets (2015) and poetry collections such as Gifts that seem to be other gifts (Amadeu Oller Award, 2011), explains that he has not yet digested the recognition for this story that is a cry to take the reins of one's own life.

When he won the award He said he had just gone through the worst year of his life.. How are you doing?

— It's complicated. I was a bit shocked at first, because I'm coming off a divorce that has kept me in the shadows, in the dark for a year. It's been a war, and now I feel like I'm a bit in the post-war period. I've suffered a lot trying to find a home for myself and my children. I've had to accept that a new part of life is beginning now, in which I'm alone with my children and I have to take care of everything. All of this has brought me a lot of anguish, sadness and guilt. Last July I was so bad that I ended up calling the suicide hotline, luckily a man answered and convinced me that life was worth living. The week before winning the prize I was in a hotel in Madrid having an anxiety attack. I still feel very shaken. I know that I should be happy about the prize, but my body is coming from such a hard place that I still need to ground everything.

The protagonist, Lena, is also going through a life-changing situation. Has this been a mirror for her?

— The novel is fiction, but obviously some of my own things have slipped through. I feel like a creative channel, like a pipe through which the stream of water passes and takes away some of my particles. I expose myself above all in the articles because I think that everything personal is political. I don't want to hide vulnerability because I think it's essential to communicate with the world and because exposing it makes us all relax, but I don't want my discourse to imply victimhood or to mark my person.

In the novel, this vulnerability is reflected in an overwhelmed woman trying to balance a demanding professional career with caring for her child. How does the book portray motherhood?

— For the last four years of my life I have lived under the pressure of the double motherhood that I so desired. At the same time, socially I see that it would be much easier if I just wanted to be a mother and that was it. It was much easier when women had no aspirations, and that is what the right defends, that we become angels of the home again. As a woman I feel that I have to climb two mountains, that of a professional career and that of parenting. With my first pregnancy I retired from work, with my second I had an internal struggle and decided that I would not do it. Socially it is very complicated. All the time I have felt like a bad mother, a bad professional, a bad friend, a bad daughter.

Guilt is also closely linked to the novel's trigger, perinatal mourning and obstetric violence. Lena loses a daughter during the Christmas holidays and, when a gynecologist performs a biopsy, she does not take her emotions into account.

— This is absolutely personal. It seemed symbolic to me to explain it as a starting point and then have it buried, because that's life. I changed the year with a dead child inside me and, in addition, it was my birthday. I was still having morning sickness while I was accepting that I would not be a mother again. You lose a child and the next day you don't even have a sick leave for that grief, life is already telling you: "Go ahead, go ahead." And after a while, suddenly, boom!, that grief returns and you are crying out of time because the processes have not been respected.

Not only does she lose a child, but she also sees the job opportunity she was hoping for denied her. Faced with these setbacks, she decides to leave for France with a stranger. Is this an escape?

— She turns the wheel. She sees all her professional ambition, for which she has paid a high price, collapsing and, therefore, decides to govern herself. She knows that she may be making the biggest mistake of her life, but for personal dignity she needs to leave. If you are a mother, it is impossible to go to a random place for three days just because you feel like it. Lena overcomes her fear and does it. As Joan Fuster said, she returns to practicing the habit of her lost freedom.

The turn of the wheel leads her to Abel, who decides to go look for his former lover, Margue, even though she is still married to Benoît.

— This story is a chain of favours between strangers and of loving through someone else. Abel does a favour to Lena, she returns it and then Abel does a favour to Benoît. This allows Lena to start from scratch, because a stranger will never know how much you have failed. Through Margue, Lena is reconciled with her mother, because she sees a maternal figure, while Margue sees in Lena the daughter she did not have when she decided to have an abortion. And then there is the love between Benoît and Margue, who deviate from the more traditional family model, but pay a high price.

Lena's family model, on the other hand, is much more conventional. At home she has a man, Dan, who prioritises his work over conciliation. Have you been cruel when writing this character?

— I didn't want to make a cliché out of Dan's character, but it's still a compendium of personal experiences that I've picked up from my friends. The fact that it's hard to accept is another thing. I think that men are our allies and that a lot of weight is involved in parenting, but the system is still on their side. It's hard for them to take the step of maximum empathy, to withdraw for a while if the woman has been sucking up for a few years, to give us the privilege. In the end, marriage is still a business in which tasks must be shared. If I ask for babysitters to look after my children while I work, I won't ask for more babysitters afterwards to go to the hairdresser. They, on the other hand, come back from a work trip and go have a beer with their friends without feeling guilty.