Rosa Montero had her first panic attack at the age of 16.
She was standing in the living room of her house, it was eleven o'clock at night and suddenly the room she was in “she went to the other side of a black tunnel”.
“Imagine, you get an atrocious panic that you don't know what it is.
And suddenly another panic enters you: I'm crazy, because how can you explain that?
Montero, who is presenting his most recent book at the International Book Fair (FIL) these days,
The danger of being sane
, explained to them that what he felt that day was that "the world had gone": "What it means that you have left, you have left the world, you feel like the only Martian.
What we call madness is a brutal loneliness.
Upon entering the auditorium of the Center for Social Sciences and Humanities, a university complex 20 minutes from the venue where the most important book fair in Spanish takes place, Montero found himself in front of an audience formed, above all, by students of Letters and dressed in white T-shirts emblazoned with her name: Rosa Montero, in orange and green.
Later, they will ask her to print her signature in her black marker there as well.
“Don't sit down, I'm going to take a picture of them.
How good, I love it, you are divine ”, the author told them.
For six months, the students have been preparing for this meeting, reading the bibliography of the author of
The Cannibal's Daughter
(1997) or
The Ridiculous Idea of Never Seeing You Again
(2013).
The writer, close and frantic, has also calmed the nerves of the teacher who was introducing her: “You don't have to be afraid.
Besides, I talk a lot."
Rosa Montero poses in front of the 300 students from the CUCSH University Center for Social Sciences and Humanities, who attended her talk. Roberto Antillón
The students sitting in the auditorium have risen to ask him questions, some trembling, others with nervous laughter.
She has answered them directly.
“You-don't-live-from-creative-writing.
Period”, she has said to a girl.
How do you start writing at 50?
Just like at 15, honey,” she has cheered on another student.
And she specified: “Writing is very slow and very hard work.
Writing is breaking stone.
I've seen talented people do nothing with it.
You have to be as tenacious as a stalactite”.
That panic attack that Montero had at the age of 16 was followed by others that lasted until he turned 30. Montero has explained that this "psychic pain" that he felt, and felt every time, is "inexpressible": "Because who would Are you going to tell it if you are the only Martian you know?
The author has lamented that "this damn society" stigmatizes and hides mental illness.
“The pandemic has opened that taboo a bit.
But the door is going to close right away, we have to finish kicking it open ”, she requested.
The author has explained that it was her trying to understand what was wrong with her that she began to study Psychology.
"At that time nobody took you to the psychiatrist, nor did they give you anxiolytics, I have had panic attacks bareback, which is not the best, that is, long live chemistry," he said.
The author then questioned the young people: “Those of you who have panic attacks and anxiety attacks have confidence, because they pass.
Take anxiolytics or not, they pass.
Have peace of mind.
You end up getting used to living with your suitcase of darkness”.
When she understood what was happening to her, she dropped out of Psychology and entered Journalism.
Many years later, she woke up one morning knowing that she had to write a book to answer questions that had been “bumping” in her head since she was a child.
What is sanity?
What is madness?
How is it related to creativity?
She then began to write
The danger of being sane
(Seix Barral, 2022), which she will present this Friday at five in the afternoon at the FIL in Guadalajara.
It is a "literary artifact", she describes it, a "rare book" that does not fit well within any genre because it contains so many.
“I am always saying everywhere that for me it is the book of my life”, she has recounted, and has recited the first line: “I have always known that there was something that was not working well inside my head”.
Rosa Montero during the coexistence with students, at the University Center of Social Sciences and Humanities of Guadalajara. Roberto Antillón
"I have a theory, I tell it in
The danger of being sane
," he told his audience.
“The people who need to read in a passionate way to live belong to what Marcel Proust called “the magnificent and unfortunate family of the nervous”, Montero has pronounced, and has continued: “The brain takes a long time to mature.
In the first puberty this step of brain maturity occurs, which is very important.
But there is 20% of the population that skips that step.
Among them are people with mental disorders and people who are dedicated to creative things.
I'm not saying it, neuroscientists say it.
Now I add: and all of you, all those people who do not dedicate themselves to creative things but depend on reading and that search for beauty in order to survive”.
“This book speaks, among other things, that normality does not exist and is a claim to difference”, he explained.
Montero has told an anecdote about a woman who told him 25 years ago that she kept the nails she cut on her feet and hands in matchboxes.
She found it so curious that she told it in an article in EL PAÍS, where she is a columnist.
But then she wrote more people who did the same thing.
"So you can see.
We have to bring the difference to light, because this dictatorship of normality does a lot of damage.
We create defensive strategies from a very young age and we hide so much that we mutilate who we really are”.
"You have to normalize the difference and you have to talk about the mental disorder," he asked, and in the end he excused himself: "I got a whiff, but it's important."
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