Alba Dalmau: “For a few months, my grandmother and my son were almost the same person”

Barcelona"I have learned that bonds have nothing to do with milk or blood and that it is enough to love," writes Alba Dalmau (Cardedeu, 1987) If a family (Ángulo). Her fourth novel is the story of a family brought together by chance. Paloma, a flight attendant, ends up living by chance with her former teenage enemy and, although they are not a couple, together they raise a son. If a family It talks about the strength of bonds and how identity is defined by childhood and the people who have cared for us.

A Love and not (Ángulo, 2021) explored the friendship between a man and a woman after a breakup. Here the protagonists are two friends who decide to share their motherhood. Why do you write about relationships that go beyond social normality?

— My novels are a moment of closure of a vital stage. The path of the bramble bushes (Ángulo, 2019) spoke of the dichotomy between the town and the city, and this was linked to how I related to town life and city life. In the case ofLove and not I questioned the topic of the ex and talked about the end of love. Now I wanted to explore the idea of family in a very broad sense, not only as a blood bond, but also as a family is a way of relating between people, of socializing, of transmitting values. Throughout life I have seen that this is not necessarily linked to the people with whom you share genetics. Family is a mix of what you cannot avoid, the people you were born to, and those people you want to be part of your life. It is an oasis where you can allow yourself to be vulnerable and, at the same time, it is a trap, because you cannot avoid it and it binds you in many ways.

Paloma and her parents want to, but they just can't find their space. What happens when you don't get along with your parents?

— Faced with this, she has to look for family elsewhere, and the big surprise for her part is realizing that sometimes life puts people in front of you who are what you needed, and vice versa. Often a gesture of help and love is enough to label us as family. In the novel, in fact, these ties don't even have a label: they are friends, neighbors, a woman who is in a nursing home with whom, suddenly, the protagonist feels that there is something that unites her.

The protagonists are 35-year-old women without a partner or a home of their own. Does the novel seek to reflect a generational precariousness?

— Yes, Paloma and Aída are my age when they have a baby. They are two women from this generation who already knew that we would be affected by the crisis and, aware of this, studied what we wanted because we knew that we should work in whatever we could. They decide to ride out life and get ahead without thinking, but there is a moment when biology takes over. They find that, due to systemic issues, they have not been able to have savings or buy a flat and they have to make decisions in a somewhat urgent way. When Paloma becomes pregnant she knows that it may be the last time she will be able to be a mother, and that sets the engine of the novel in motion very quickly.

What image of motherhood does the book give?

— I wanted to reflect it as I experienced it. I am used to reading books about motherhood that are accompanied by very strong feelings: a great longing, a great guilt, a great regret. I have not experienced it like that, but in an absolutely organic and calm way, without thinking that the child is the only member of the family. I have consciously tried to put it in the same place as friends, partner, work. I did not want the fact of being a mother to isolate me from the world. Paloma rejects this model of exclusive motherhood and makes decisions that go against it: she decides not to breastfeed her son, after two months she needs to go back to work. All this does not mean that she prefers the child.

Probably the most peculiar member of this family is Simona, a nonagenarian woman who lives in a nursing home and for whom Paloma feels a great fascination.

— Simona needs to build her family through letters and a diary to understand where she comes from. It is a search for her identity; you understand yourself as you understand your family, you build yourself either by similarity or by similarity. She lives with this discomfort, she is a surly character and at the same time a very imaginative woman, and until she discovers who her parents were she cannot be at peace with herself. Through her I wanted to talk about memory and the need to know where we come from to know why we are the way we are.

Your story serves to capture the daily life of people who are in the final moments of their lives. How did you want to show your old age?

— I was hoping for a tribute to this stage of life. The genesis of the novel comes from the fact that I had a child and, at the same time, my grandmother was put in a nursing home. For a few months, my grandmother and my son were almost the same person. It amazed me. They only slept and ate. The child began to say words, the grandmother stopped saying them. He began to walk, she stopped. It bothered me to see all the resources we have to deal with motherhood, dozens of books to help the child eat or sleep or not throw tantrums and, on the other hand, there are very few books on how to deal with old age and how to accompany them in death. They are two equally transcendental and transformative stages of life, but we give a lot of importance to one and very little to the other.