Cristina Campos: "Women are mentally unfaithful"

She comes to Madrid

for the interview from Barcelona, ​​where she lives with her husband, the filmmaker Jaume Balagueró, and their three children.

It is not about any special power of convocation, but that a finalist of the Planet in promotion goes to the end of the world to talk about her book if necessary.

In fact, Campos has been touring Spain, alone or in the company of Luz Gabás, the winner, since the jury's decision last October.

To optimize time, we meet at a hotel near the AVE station, a probable scene of clandestine romances and fleeting encounters taking advantage of work trips.

The story is about that, love, heartbreak, loyalty, infidelity and, above all, friendship between women.

Sort of a 300-page girls' dinner, she told him.

The comparison doesn't bother him.

Do you write from hearsay or from experiences?

The book arises from the confidence of a friend and the betrayal of another.

One tells me that she is being unfaithful to her husband, and she does it out of heartbreak, grief and guilt.

I found this vulnerability of women interesting.

My male friends have told me similar situations from euphoria, without a trace of guilt.

I think that women do not know how to lead a double life.

And is that a virtue?

I don't see it that way.

It just doesn't happen.

I wouldn't hook up one night with just anyone.

However, friends of mine have gone out with colleagues to have a

, they have ended up having it with someone and they have returned home as if nothing had happened.

There is the masculine tradition of gray hair in the air.

In the woman, no;

or not so much.

You only have to look at the figures for the consumption of female and male prostitution.

Are you saying that women are faithful by nature?

I can't generalize.

I'm talking about my friends.

We are intelligent and hardworking women, we have the opportunity to be unfaithful, and we are not because we decide not to be.

The woman is more mentally, psychologically unfaithful, a more subtle infidelity, which, many times, does not go beyond that.

A married friend has been running into a man she loves for 15 years at work, she fixes herself up for him and that gives her her life.

But that's so sad, isn't it?

That is pure energy.

Are you going to risk the relationship with the person you love for that?

Are you going to risk love and an existential crisis?

What I think is that women are smarter.

Are the explicit sex scenes the most difficult to write?

It has been the most fun.

It amuses me, it excites me, and if it excites others, that's where my talent lies.

In the book I have stripped myself psychically and physically.

I have done a very brutal introspection exercise.

When I talk about how the protagonist caresses herself thinking about the man she likes and who is not her husband, it is how I do it, and I am not unfaithful.

I asked my friends, and this is funny: no one caresses herself thinking about her husband.

It's very interesting.

A friend, a successful writer, avoids writing about sex because she is embarrassed if her children read it.

Does she understand that self-censorship?

Look, I'm not short on that.

Just like I've never faked an orgasm.

I come from a very free family, with a bohemian writer father and a business mother, and at home we have always talked about sex naturally.

The first person I told that I had made love to was my mother.

At this moment in my life, the one who weighs motherhood is me.

That has bad press.

I have three children: 22, 14 and 5 years old.

I am really enjoying the prize, the tour.

Now I come from Cabo de Gata, and I would have been so comfortable by myself for three days there.

It makes me happier to be with you right now than to be taking care of my children, although I will return home to be with them before leaving for Gran Canaria the day after tomorrow.

It sucks to say it, but it's true.

In the promotion of my first book, my son was a baby and then the separation broke my heart;

now I have 22 years of maternity.

I search and I do not find spaces of solitude.

Don't you eat the guilt?

Not me anymore.

I had an unmarried daughter, at the age of 23, and it was very difficult, for many years I was a broken woman, and I am speaking to you from privilege.

It took me years of therapy until I met Jaume, my husband, with whom I had another two.

I love my children very much.

However, with maturity, you realize that there is nothing wrong with not seeing them in a month because, in the end, your children leave, our husbands leave, and one like mine, who works in the cinema, closes the door, he goes away for three months to shoot, and you're left alone.

How is the coexistence between artists?

Is there professional jealousy?

We're a team.

I have been supporting his career for 15 years.

Because I have been the one who wanted to take care of my children, but, if not, neither of us would have been able to.

This is my year, so I told him, you know what this award means.

He has postponed a movie for me.

We are a contemporary and privileged couple and we support each other.

The book extols female friendship.

Why does he kill her friends?

Almost.

I have a hard core of female friends for 25 years.

It is the most beautiful thing that has happened to me in my life.

More than family.

More than boyfriends, more than husbands, more than children, because it is the chosen family.

They have betrayed me, I have betrayed.

I have learned to be a better friend at 40. I have lied to protect a friend, for example, knowing that she was being unfaithful while she was nursing her child.

It was more the harm she could do to him than what she was going to accomplish by ratting on her husband.

In the end, they got divorced, but not because of me.

You are a casting director.

Do mature women have a worse time getting film and TV roles?

Sometimes it makes me tender to see actresses operated on or inflated by botox.

I don't think anyone asks.

Directors don't want actresses with Botox.

If you ask me for a 55-year-old woman, you expect her to have wrinkles.

I see the second if someone has put things on, and I think that she is making a mistake.

The bad thing is that, perhaps, they don't ask for as many 55-year-old actresses as 25.

Well, it's true that the last

I've done asked me for women of 35, but in the series that is going to be done about my book there will be women of that age.

I already have a face in mind.

Will you direct it?

I could, I can be a director.

In that sense, I don't have the impostor syndrome, what I don't know is if I'm willing to assume the personal resignation that it implies.

When I see so many men up there, I think that they don't care about that resignation.

It's hard for me.

Maternity weighs on me, but, at the same time, I want to be with them, and walk with my friends, and reaching that high is a very beastly resignation.

That difference between men and women is interesting.

Good self-esteem.

Were you surprised to be a finalist for the Planet?

Yes and no.

When she was writing she thought: “Why not”.

I read the books that won, and I believed that I could write those kinds of contemporary stories.

You know you can, right?

You know your possibilities.

I trust myself and I think: "If this or this one has been a finalist, I can too".

She hasn't told me about the betrayal of that friend that prompted her to write the book.

I can't give you more information, we made peace.

I'll just tell you one thing: if you hurt an artist, they will pay you back in the form of a work of art.

Like Shakira with Piqué?

You said it.

'VICEPLANETARY'

Cristina Campos (Barcelona, ​​47 years old) has chosen the cast of several films and series that you have in your memory.

That, that of casting director, was her main job until she wrote her first novel,

 which was made into a film in 2021 by Benito Zambrano.

With her second book,

she was a finalist for the Planeta Award that Luz Gabás won last October.

Campos, married to the filmmaker Jaume Balagueró and mother of three children, delves into the relationship of four friends over the years and her professional, personal and sentimental ups and downs. 

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