Sara is 65 years old, she is a writer of children's literature and lives in an isolated house in the middle of the forest. She hasn't spoken to her son for twenty years, but when after a fall she is rescued by a talking wolf, Impossible, she contacts him. What is the wound that she will have to close? The answer lies in Un cor de neu (La Magrana), by Anna Manso (Barcelona, 1969), which after 50 books dedicated to children and young people makes its debut in adult literature – if we except The worst mother in the world (Harp / Column ), which wasn't exactly fiction.
But why would an established author with a work—in addition to the countless scripts she's also working on—decide to try new territory? “I knew the case of a family in which the father had sexually abused one of his children and the mother had looked at everything from another side. I couldn't understand it, but I promised myself that I would write it”, explains Manso.
It was not easy for him. “It took me five or six years to assimilate it, until I found Impossible, the wolf that talks to the protagonist, and it took me another four years to weave the story”, she develops. And although she believes that "everything can be written for children, and there are children's books that talk about abuse", she wanted to address adults: "They are the recipients, because it is still a taboo, and if they have gone through that they should know that they can get ahead. That's happening and we don't want to see it."
It is a very widespread problem, yes, which has also affected her directly: "As a child I suffered a little abuse, outside the family, and that is why I had to be able to write it without breaking down." He further documented himself by contacting the activist against child sexual abuse Vicki Bernadet – who would tell him that there are no small abuses –, who put him in front of “the world of incomprehension, of silence, of the immediate environment, the people who would have to protect you the most , because it is not a foreign event, but it happens next to home, and sometimes also at home ”.
One of the aspects that cost Manso the most is precisely that although the story behind it is very hard, he did not want to focus strictly on the abuse, to which in fact he devotes a few lines, but rather on the consequences, on "how can one live at leave from here." “I wanted the reader to be able to get into the subject, without lurid scenes that even I couldn't read,” he insists.
The author needed to understand what could lead a mother to behave this way and how she could try to cope, too. “There are people who are absorbed by misfortune, and silence is a double-edged sword, you can have a second chance, but it is not easy because time does not heal everything”, she assures. For her, "life is quite easy but we complicate it, sometimes we self-boycott in the face of wonderful situations that would allow us redemption."
Although it is for adults, the novel also wants to be a tribute to children's and youth literature (LIJ), and it does so by turning it into a kind of story with "some of the archetypes that make up our literature: the witch, the wolf, the hunter , the sad prince...”. And it is that Manso defends that the LIJ is not valued much in the literary system –“Jordi Sierra i Fabra, for example, is our Stephen King, and he is not paid enough attention”, he says–, and he is surprised that adults do not read. For this reason, she does not consider that as an author she is now "a new Anna Manso": "It's me, with the same style and humor as the house brand." And it is that the book "does not close a stage, but opens it", and she clinches: "I consider that I am in a sweet moment of creativity, which is a muscle that stretches". The pandemic first took its toll on her, but later she noticed a great stream of creativity, she felt connected to this new work. She is emphatic: “Human beings need stories to organize ourselves, we write fiction to explain reality to ourselves. Literature heals”.
Catalan version, here
