Marta Vives: "There are friendships you don't choose or seek; they just find you."

BarcelonaWhen the idea of writing about friendship was first beginning to float through her head, Marta Vives (Reus, 1976) came across an unusual story: that of two women, one with a terminal illness and the other with a magnificent house by the sea. The first was looking for a place to say goodbye to her family for a month, and the second offered her her home. They had never met, but in those four weeks, they became friends. "In an age dominated by social media, where it seems we all have a lot of followers, the idea of friendship is being perverted. It's a bond that, when it's true, you recognize perfectly. We define it from an intimate perspective, something like religion and faith," explains Vives, a writer and journalist for Catalunya Ràdio. That story between two strangers fascinated her, and she made it her own as one of the four stories in the book. You have the strength of all things (Now Books).

"There are friendships that you neither choose nor seek, they come to you," says Vives. This is what her second title, which arrives three years after Let's say loveThere he collected the true love stories of twelve witnesses that were the seed of the columns Love and pepper in the supplement Sunday of the ARA. In You have the strength of all thingsVives captures the bonds between women of different generations who, in one way or another, have found each other and become key players in each other's lives. The protagonists of the second story, for example, are a group of women from a small town with "a very special strength among them," says Vives.

A Trip to Beirut and a Sudden Death

Through these stories, the author explores themes such as motherhood, perinatal grief, caring for elderly parents, and managing a sudden absence. She does so with reality as an anchor—all the narratives speak of real events and people—but also plays with fiction. "The journalistic foundation, searching for stories and interviewing the protagonists, is what gives me security. Then I write, focusing on specific details, interweaving one story with the other," the author notes. The third story is the most personal: Vives fictionalizes the trip to Beirut of three friends and pays double homage to Learning to talk to plants (Periscope, 2018), by Marta Orriols, and in Allies (Ara Llibres, 2023), by Txell Feixas.

But the most difficult to write was the fourth: the story of a twelve-year-old girl whose best friend has just suddenly died. "In one way or another, all the stories touch on motherhood, whether it's the relationship with one's children or the relationship with one's parents," Vives points out. In the last story, the writer wanted to reflect "a mother who can't solve anything or save you, because she can't." Faced with her daughter's grief and profound sense of loss, the mother is incapable of lying. "She has no answers. She can only be there, with her daughter, supporting her in a moment of maximum vulnerability," she explains.

You have the strength of all things takes the title from a verse byEnric Casasses and structures the stories based on another verse from the same poem, in which he speaks of the sea, volcanoes, trees, and truth. The poem in question was a gift from the linguist Carme Junyent in Vives. "Shortly before she died, she sent me the poem to read at her funeral. I hadn't heard of it, and I thought it defined Carme very well," the writer recalls. She shared a beautiful friendship with her, which unexpectedly sparked the book.