Albert Espinosa always wears yellow. The color of him. The color of those young people who, like him, learned to live fully from the rooms of a hospital that had become his home. "Yellows are the people who give meaning to our lives, who are situated between love and friendship", he usually explains.
The concept is not yours. It comes from a 93-year-old woman from Zaragoza who coincided with him when he was fighting cancer for ten years, an osteosarcoma, which he was diagnosed with when he was a thirteen-year-old teenager. "He told us to look for yellows and taught us to learn that it was not sad to die, the important thing was to live intensely," she explains on the podcast Los Libros secretos. "He told me: I see you as a writer's soul. One day if you can, he talks about the yellow ones, I'll give them to you." And he did so. The yellow world was the first of his literary successes. Others would come later.
Espinosa, who currently hosts the television program El camino a casa and who has recently published his third book of short stories How well you do me when you do me well, goes to the recording studio of La Vanguardia with his bedside book, The Four Seasons of Stephen King who first read when he was 22 years old. "Every year I reread the stories in the station that touches", she acknowledges before pointing out that "it is the book that I have given the most in my life, it marked me and I have tried to mark many people".
From this reading, Espinosa ended up devouring the entire bibliography of the American, whom he met in person and gave him advice that applies. "He told me to find my ideal atmosphere of creation and I write all the books by hand and next to water." For the rest of the writing, such as the scripts, he opts for the computer and has even done a test with ChatGPT. "He imitates the style very well but his heart fails him. He would never have written that, there were many clichés", he comments amused while he considers that the AI will be yellow. "I think he's going to have empathy, which is something we're missing."
The author of Pulseras Rojas confesses that he likes to set limits. "What I'm most passionate about is changing," he says. And his limit is at number 17. "I have done 17 plays and I will only write 17 books, now I am going for 13," he continues before assuring that he is "fascinated" that his writings help his readers, although sometimes they do not he remembers "having written according to which book. They gave me almost 200 rounds of chemotherapy and I have chemo nebula, I don't remember anything over five years," he reveals.
