Sílvia Soler: "If we want our children to be brave, we must accept that they will make us suffer more."

BarcelonaUntil now Silvia Soler (Figueres, 1961) had not written any novel that covered three generations of the same family. Strong heart (Universe, 2025) covers seven decades of the life of its protagonist, Teresa, "third daughter of the Fluvià dels polls", stallholders at the Arenales market: due to a slip she becomes pregnant and makes a decision that will change her life.

Strong heart Is it a novel about how the world changes or about how we change?

— I don't know if it's because I've gotten older or because the world is turning upside down – perhaps it's both – but I think we can really say that a whole world is disappearing. The novel begins in 1950 and Teresa falls in love in a tent. One of her daughters will set up a tent guatecas as it was done during the Transition. And the clean-up will have parties like the ones we have now.

Teresa is the daughter of stallholders, and in principle she was supposed to follow in the footsteps of her parents.

— Yes. She chooses not to study. She is an unassuming girl. She has friends in the school.

She also works because she "wants to have money to buy clothes" and to "save for when she has to get married." But a man, Alfonso, disrupts her plans.

— He turns her plans upside down in the worst possible way. Alfonso uses and deceives Teresa in the most despicable way possible. He leaves her pregnant and then wants nothing to do with it. The unintentional pregnancy changes and distorts everything. It forces him to act with a maturity that is not appropriate for his age. He is nineteen years old.

When she explains to her parents that she wants to have the child, Mom tells her that she will have to be strong-hearted.

— It is a very genuine expression and difficult to translate. It also defines a certain Catalan quality. When they tell you to make your heart strong, they ask you to be brave, but there is also a touch of Christian resignation. I would say that this type of advice has been widely transmitted among women.

Having a daughter, whom she names Olvido, forces her to wake up, and so she decides to start studying languages. Teresa does not want to resign herself to being a woman who only lives behind closed doors. She could have told her story from a place of resentment, but she does not.

— The thing is that Teresa's generation is my mother's. I feel very close to her. Neither she nor many other women I have known of her age ever had an attitude of resentment, and I like to explain that. Some were aware that their family life had limited their possibilities, but they adapted. Others, and this was both Teresa's and my mother's choice, tried to remedy it.

In addition to studying languages, Teresa reads novels by Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott and other authors, always in Spanish, until she discovers Diamond Square of Mercè Rodoreda.

— With Rodoreda she realises that there is a different connection with reading in one's own language and, above all, she discovers a story that unsettles her because it is a bit like her life. Like Colometa, Teresa has also met the man who changes her life in a tent.

When you talk about how Rodoreda changes Teresa's perspective as a reader, are you talking a little about yourself?

— My mother was a literature teacher and she was very attentive to what I read. When I was fifteen, I was still reading Enid Blyton novels. I remember one day my mother came to me and said: "I've finished reading Enid Blyton, you have to try something with a face and eyes." Diamond Square I was so impressed by it that I thought, "That's what I would like to do."

In her Teresa I see more of Teresa Valldaura, who is the haystack of the family of Broken mirror, also from Rodoreda.

— It's very well received. I had both novels in mind. I named my character Teresa after Mercè Rodoreda and because I was looking for a name that was used a hundred years ago and that still hasn't gone out of fashion.

Her Teresa ends up being part of the bourgeoisie without intending to.

— When she starts to party with Miquel she feels very out of place. The two house moves they undergo are upsetting. Teresa goes from being a chicken seller to being a bourgeois lady.

And soon she becomes the mother of four children. With Miquel she has three. El Olvido, the first, is the one that worries her the most.

— Because it is the bravest. If we want our children to be brave, we must accept that they will make us suffer more. It is a great contradiction that we mothers experience - I suppose fathers too: it is true that we want our children to be braver and more independent, but the day when their freedom becomes real, it goes beyond what was expected. And this causes suffering.

At one point in the novel, "a good and honest man" gives in "to the impulses of his heart" and falls in love with another woman. This hurts Teresa. She could have turned on this man, but she doesn't. Why?

— The years make you understand many things, and this is one of the basic ones: a good person can not only be unfaithful, but can even commit a crime.

In the book, that infidelity does not destroy the marriage.

— I speak of the stability of marriage as what nautical treaties call Navigation by appreciationTeresa and Miquel's marriage is progressing according to the calculations they have made: they have created a common project, which is a family, they love and respect each other, but they run into a storm... and that deviates their path a little. Even so, they end up moving forward.