Jessica del Moral: "Sometimes we still see school friends with whom we have nothing in common."

BarcelonaThanks to a pan of blue crab that they refused to serve her, journalist Jéssica del Moral (Martorell, 1982) made the leap into literature. She was alone in a restaurant in the Ebro Delta when she was told she couldn't order the pan in question because it needed to be served by two people. She considered asking the stranger at the next table if he wanted to share it with her, but ended up tweeting to explain the situation. "Journalist Jaume Clotet responded by saying it was a good start to a novel, and editor Glòria Gasch added that he was right," recalls Del Moral. The journalist and presenter of the program Connected The Red had manuscripts in her drawer and those messages encouraged her to take them seriously. The anecdote was the trigger for Bonds, affections and shackles (Column), a fiction made of interconnected stories that reflects how emotional relationships can be a refuge, but also a condemnation.

"We are social animals and we define ourselves based on our connections and what others project onto us," says Del Moral. The novel's pages feature teenage couples who break up with the arrival of a third person, a recent widow who becomes involved with a stranger, a father with temporary amnesia, and an Italian expat who has sacrificed everything for work and finds herself alone in Paris. The author plays with chance to bring together characters who, in one way or another, all end up connected. "Life is made up of a series of coincidences that end up leading us down one path or another. Not all of us end up married or living with people from our environment with whom we went to kindergarten," emphasizes Del Moral.

Friends with a Place by Seniority

The stories in the book cite an underlying critique of the institutionalization of some relationships, whether romantic or friendship. "Sometimes we're forty and still see school friends with whom we have nothing in common, as if they've earned their place based on seniority. The same happens with certain work relationships, which we maintain because it's hard to break the bond, because we're afraid of the void. Perhaps we could do like love, a healthy and clear break." In the book, there's a character who makes this clear: a woman writes to all her friends and tells them that, for years, she's given them wedding gifts and gifts for their children. Now she's asking for a return: she wants to move to Los Angeles and hopes they'll help pay for it, she writes in a message that ends with the account number.

The story is inspired by a friend of the author's who made the same gesture, wanting to go to India. In fact, Del Moral has drawn on the situations she's seen around her to build the characters in the book. "They all come, to one degree or another, from my environment or from things that have happened to me. I guess I have a radar; I store things I see that could be a story, and when I start to tell a story, what emerges as if it had been waiting for me," the writer notes. Sifting all these experiences through the lens of literature has helped her objectify them. She says: "I've analyzed their behaviors and their life arcs, and now I see everything from a different perspective."