María Zaragoza: “The first thing a writer has to learn is to lie”

The writer María Zaragoza (Madrid, 41 years old) published her first book when she was only 17 years old and since then she has created more than a dozen books of stories, comics and novels;

with the last one,

The Library of Fire

, she won the Azorín Prize, as before the Ateneo Joven of Seville.

The author, raised in La Mancha, has always maintained a special relationship with cinema: “When she was little, she didn't eat anything, and my grandmother realized that if there was a movie on television, then she would eat.

And she started letting me watch any movie just so I could eat,” she says.

From that love comes

Divine Accounts

, her first script brought to the big screen, which has been nominated for the Goya.

Ask.

A script, a Goya nomination.

What aim.

Answer.

I dreamed of a script and I started writing it.

I sent it to the actress Eulalia Ramón to see if she wanted to act in it and it turns out that she wanted to direct something.

When she called me back I had the plan, the actress (Celia Freijeiro)… It was a gift to premiere it in Sitges and then it has been one crazy thing after another.

Q.

What is

Divine Accounts

like ?

A.

It is a black comedy about the consumer society that ends up consuming people.

When we reach the limit with someone we think “I'll kill him,” but we don't do it because we have a social code that prevents us from doing so.

I asked myself what would happen if someone is so saturated with all the social codes that have been imposed on them that they no longer distinguish the priority ones from the secondary ones.

The protagonist's husband uses these codes to benefit himself: she wants to be modern, feminist... And he uses it by proposing polyamory, but trying to extend her heteropatriarchal privilege with two women.

Q.

Should cinema be feminized?

A.

It is quite rare that the core of a film are all women, as happens in this short, and there has to be more because we are half of humanity.

Much progress has been made in recent years but there is still a long way to go.

We are expected to tell certain types of stories because we are women and we have to dynamite that.

Q.

Are you tired of watching

men

's movies ?

A.

No,

gentlemen

also have the right to tell their stories and in fact there are many of their films that I like.

But I'm bored with the role that women play in these productions: if you can replace the actress with a cactus and it still works, something is not right.

And that happens, although less and less.

Q.

Is there magical realism from La Mancha?

A.

Yes. Terror and the fantastic are usually related to wooded landscapes and humid places.

But in La Mancha what scares you is the infinite horizon, having nowhere to hide, the luminosity.

That gives you a way to look at gender differently, as I do in my latest book,

Hell is a Teenage Girl

.

Q.

Is the story the poor brother of the novel?

A.

No, it is a different way of conceiving a story.

They are two different types of races, a novel is a marathon and a story is a sprint.

Q.

Why were you so precocious in literature?

A.

I started writing fiction when I was seven years old, I made versions of the books I liked or I took the characters and invented new adventures, which would now be

fanfiction

.

Then I discovered that there was a person behind it, and I decided that that was what I wanted to do in life, tell stories.

I said it at school, but kids never want to be writers, and everyone looked at me like I was a Martian.

Then I learned that the first thing a writer has to learn is to lie.

I started saying that I wanted to be a journalist, and they looked at me more kindly.

But I wouldn't be a good journalist, I would make up the news.

María Zaragoza, at the Film Academy in Madrid.

Jaime Villanueva

Q.

Are you obsessed with death?

A.

There is a worrying lack of normalization in death.

Death is part of life and it is where we are all going to end up.

It is very good that part of our life goal is to try to deceive her, but we have to be aware that we cannot do it.

Before, death was more involved in people's lives, but little by little it became something that had to be hidden.

And all there is to hide is great literary material.

Q.

In

Germans blow their heads off for love

there is a parallel world, the square, which is reminiscent of social networks.

A.

I proposed that when we don't think about anything or dream, we would all go to the same place and be able to communicate with people thousands of kilometers away, where things happen that can influence reality.

Everything breaks down when they try to attract the ties they have made in the world of ideas to the real world.

That has happened with social networks.

Emotionally they have made us a bit stupid: I have seen people who have been left out by their friends for something they have posted on Twitter.

And that seems like a problem to me, because the important thing is that person with whom you have coffee.

And they make you get into a bubble of people who think like you, which makes us increasingly biased.

Q.

In your books you always talk about new ways of loving.

Can anything be written about sex now or are there still taboos?

A.

You can write about anything, but there will be people who will get upset.

I have always thought that everything is fine as long as all parties agree and respect each other, and that is how I have tried to express it.

When polyamory came out, I was amused by the number of men who tried to convince their wives to bring their mistress into their home.

Not all parties agree there, there is a power dynamic that I don't like.

Q.

How important is culture in this neoliberal world?

A.

They want to give him less and less and that is why it is increasingly important.

I believe that there has been a progressive

discrediting

of the arts and letters that is closely linked to a significant loss of reading comprehension, critical sense and many other things that have to do with that.

Art is a refuge and heals, it is medicine for the spirit.

That is why it has to be accessible to everyone.

Subscribe to continue reading

Read without limits

Keep reading

I am already a subscriber

_