Enric Pardo: "My parents' divorce when I was 4 has haunted me my whole life."

BarcelonaThe visit of a clumsy and insistent encyclopedia salesman who ends up asking for the man of the house, even though there is no one in that home anymore, marks the beginning of the first novel by Enric Pardo (Castellón de la Plana, 1977), written in a rich and intimate Valencian. Known for his scripts for series such as Broiled rice, Look what you've done and Lost faggot, Pardo has needed to reconstruct his childhood and remember how his obsession with fictional worlds – literary, cinematic and comics – was born in The man of the house (La Magrana, 2025), a naked, emotional and at times uncomfortable testimony about the difficult and defective construction of a child in the 1980s.

What made you start writing? The man of the house?

— It was around 2017 when I began a process of personal revision. It coincided with the fourth wave of feminism, thanks to which I began to read writers of various generations, from Vivian Gornick to Lucia Berlin and Alicia Kopf. I saw that Alicia Kopf was holding an expanded literature workshop and I signed up with the intention of telling my story from a place I'd never tried before.

Did you have in mind to recover your childhood?

— Not at first. I started with a breakup story... But one day I shared with my classmates a love-hate story I'd experienced with my mother when we were traveling to Iceland. Everyone agreed that both the tone and the content were very true. And I ended up changing my plans.

One of the great discoveries of this book is the simple, innocent, and slightly malicious voice of this Enric, who ends up explaining his headaches, desires, and obsessions.

— It didn't take me long to realize that it made no sense for a man over 40 to dedicate himself to recounting, from his present, all his suffering. That's why I chose the voice of a child, who explains things by their name, but who is also self-serving and, therefore, somewhat deceitful. This is not Enric from today, but the one who experienced these things at four, seven, or eight years old.

He is a child who cries often: sometimes because of things that happen to him, but also because he misses his father or his grandmother and even because of the sadness that certain films such as Cinema paradise.

— Yes, he cries, yes.

The subtext of the book is that children shouldn't cry: this makes him feel even more guilty.

— Sometimes, at 47, and after undergoing a lot of therapy, I still feel like I have a cry inside that's been with me for decades. I've had to undergo a physiological learning process of breathing, of holding back the emotion so I don't let go... and even then, sometimes it comes out. A couple of weeks ago, my mother came to see me, and we were talking about Uncle Julián, my father's older brother, who died seven or eight years ago, and I couldn't help but cry. It's not that serious. I loved her very much.

If this had happened to you with your father, would it have been different?

— Sure. I was a very sensitive child, and everyone in the family realized this very early on. They knew they needed to correct me. I don't recall Dad directly telling me not to cry, but sometimes, like other people, he looked at me condescendingly and in a slightly mocking tone. Being a different kid in the '80s was a real pain, huh?

Since you were rather introverted and didn't really like sports, it didn't take long for you to feel that someone was asking if you wouldn't be"sarasa".

— At that time, being gay, heroin, and losing yourself were all the same. That's what they taught you. The fear of being gay was the fear of ending up shooting drugs and not being worth anything. When I wrote Lost faggot with the Bop Pop Many years after all this was an act of poetic justice.

In what mood did you write? The man of the houseI read the book with a heavy heart at many points.

— My parents' divorce when I was 4 has haunted me my whole life. I started the book very angry with my father, because he had been a model of toxic masculinity and a disgusting point. If I talked to him about Mad Men And if I told him it was a series about reimagining the main character, Don Draper, he wouldn't understand. He'd see him as a winner: a man who spends all day outside the house, is successful as a publicist, leaves his wife for a younger woman, has no obligations to his children...

Your book explains the difficult move from Onda to Castelló shortly after your parents' divorce.

— I grew up wondering what had caused my parents to not understand each other. It was a time when there was a stigma attached to divorce and non-normative families. As children, we were kept in the dark. Even if my sister and I didn't know the details of what had happened between them, we had our suspicions and made up our own minds.

If we didn't make them, we watched them. A divorce movie that made a lot of noise in those years was Kramer vs. Kramer (Robert Benton, 1979), with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman.

— You never quite understand why Meryl Streep's character leaves. A very nice touch in the script is that at the beginning of the film, Dustin Hoffman doesn't appear while making breakfast for his son, but by the end, he's learned.

The mother of The man of the house She's not very interested in cooking. And her son often complains about the uncreative menus...

— She doesn't like cooking or staying home all day, playing housekeeper. This is what my father would have wanted. It couldn't work. Mom was brave enough to break up the family when she realized she wasn't happy. So she had to find carob beans.

Enric del libro doesn't like the move at all.

— We moved to a 90-square-meter, three-bedroom apartment in Castellón. At the time and location we moved to, it was very small. We had to go up to the roof to hang clothes, which is why my mother always says that when she has the money, she'll buy a washer-dryer. In Castellón, she would shyly show the apartment to her friends.

Dad goes out very little, in The man of the house.

— And the few times he appears, he's absent. I wanted to leave him almost out of the book, also to emphasize that Enric misses him and doesn't see him as much as he'd like.

In some passages, the linguistic conflict between Valencian and Castilian appears. I think, for example, when they ask Enric to repeat things in "Christian" or they reproach him for having "the obsession" of speaking in Valencian.

— In the social sphere, speaking Valencian brought problems. I remember having suffered fear, contempt, and condescension because of the language I used. I even suffered moments of linguistic violence from people who were considered progressive. The death of Guillermo Agulló It shaped my generation. The impression we had from then on was that people like us could end up getting killed.

Even so, both languages coexisted in his family. And many of the cultural references that appear are Castilian: Dartacán, Mocedades, or Duncan Dhu. Enric describes Mikel Erentxun to his mother this way: "The singer is so funny because he has buck teeth and says San Sebastián instead of Donosti."

— I feel like I am the heir of my time, and for me it was equally valid Crystal ball Jaume Sisa. When it came to explaining that world, I was clear that the only way to do so was through my mother's Valencian. One of a mother's roles is to tell you about the world and teach you how to name things. My mother never studied Valencian. She learned it on the street, like many other people, who helped keep the language alive during very difficult years.

One of Enric's friends tells him he'll never be like Spiderman because he doesn't have superpowers. But he's obsessed with that superhero...

— When Peter Parker becomes Spiderman he is a superhero, but in his everyday life he is a nerd, a young man who doesn't fit in, shy, and somewhat autistic. I too would have liked to be like Spiderman, but I felt small and alone.

When it came to studying, you didn't hesitate to come to Catalonia. You studied at the Escuela Superior de Cine (Chess) and specialized in screenwriting.

— I realized very early on that I didn't fit in where I'd grown up—Onda, Castellón, and later Villarreal. I came to Catalonia to play only one card: to study so I could dedicate myself to fiction. If I hadn't worked out, I would have had to return home. This has always kept me sharp, even with that fear in mind: that of ending up working at my father's agency, a job that kills creatives and artists.

How did your mother take your book?

— When she first read it, we had a disagreement. She said there were things that weren't the way I described them. She also asked me to delete some scenes. Mom is a good reader, and I'm sure if The man of the house Had someone else written it, she wouldn't have reacted badly, but it turns out the author of the book is her son, and at many points he speaks from a place of hurt. Now that some time has passed, and I've even presented the book in Castellón, where her friends told her I'd paid tribute to her, she's starting to accept it.