The first kiss with tongue (literary)

Xavier Grasset's first French kiss was with a hamburger. "With a girl from Hamburg," the journalist explained, recalling that elusive yet unforgettable first summer love. He confessed this to the audience at Ver-MOT, held during vermouth time on the terrace of the Taberna de El Foment in Girona as part of the MOT literary festival, this year dedicated to love in all its forms and meanings. Grasset shared a conversation with two authors of a debut book: journalist Agnès Marquès, who has published the novel Nobody knows I'm here, and Glòria Gasch, editor who has jumped to the other side of the profession, that of authors, with the publication ofNow, and every morningThey had to be the authors of a first book because it was about discussing "the first time" in literature and in life. Agnès Marquès explained the reason for her debut as a novelist: "I dedicate myself to journalism because I like to tell stories, and in literature, stories are also told, in this case through the artifice of fiction. They are connecting vessels." But the natural transition from journalism to literature did not prevent her from experiencing the vertigo of a blank page, the obsession with rewriting the text, and the doubts about what she had written, which editor Gloria Gasch (in her role as editor of Columna) dispelled with encouraging advice: Marquès also discovered the fear of the last moment, when the book is at the printers and there is no possibility of amendment: "Can't we stop the machines?"

These fears also plagued Gloria Gasch as a novelist, despite her extensive experience advising authors and telling them to "overcome the vertigo and trust the editor." Like Grasset, Gasch also spoke about her first kiss, which she described as "the place we always want to return to, the place that remains forever within our soul," and revealed the first book she liked.The Hobbit, which his grandmother, his "reading mentor", gave him. "It's like people with books; you fall in love with very few and they're unique experiences."

Author of books that are included in the diary or the collection of journalistic articles, Xavier Grasset confessed that fiction inspires him "respect", which is why it's not his "first time as a novelist".

Authors such as Maggie O'Farrell, Marta Orriols, Maria Barbal, Amparo Moliner, Pol Guasch and the Granada poet Luis García Montero, author of a beautiful collection of poems, spoke about first times and other issues related to love in Girona during the first week of the MOT festival, Almudena, with verses dedicated to his deceased wife, the writer Almudena Grandes. For García Montero, love is one of the fundamental themes of literature because it is also one of the fundamental themes of life. It is the love that wanders through the pages of books, that infiltrates the plot, that moves the characters, and that makes the reader feel identified, because, as MOT curator Montse Barderi says, everyone has had experiences of love (or lack of love).