Marta Marín-Dòmine (Barcelona, 1956), director of the Born Center for Culture and Memory, is the winner of the 43rd BBVA Sant Joan Award with Diré que m'ho he inventat, a novel “based on real events” about a complex and tough daughter-mother relationship that Edicions 62 will publish on August 30. The award is endowed with 35,000 euros free of taxes and that do not correspond to copyright. The prize was awarded last night during an act in the modernist hall of the Fundació 1859 Caixa Sabadell.
The Catalan-Canadian writer recognized yesterday that the book is "a reflection and dialogue with the mother with whom I could not establish an ideal relationship", written "with the will to be sincere to the point that my ethics allowed me".
Marín-Dòmine says that it is a hard text in which he dares to explore the bad relationship between a daughter who is no longer young and a mother who "has a mental disposition close to madness", and who wonders about femininity and motherhood critically, trying to avoid clichés.
He remembered his mother as "a French woman of working-class extraction, with bourgeois tastes and a desire to advance socially that she cannot satisfy and that clashes with the way of being here during the Franco regime, which despite everything is finding its way but when she finds a path as an actress, she is cut short with the birth of her daughter”, with the frustration that this entails.
The author also insisted that, despite the opinion of many critics, she believes that autofiction is not narcissistic but rather the opposite: "The author gives up his self because he feels that what he explains is a shared experience." In any case, his story allows for the fictionalization and even the exaggeration of his story, at the same time that he also claims acceptance on the one hand and oblivion on the other, but "that the book does not want to be a reconciliation to smooth the edges, because it would run the risk of sugarcoating itself," "it is not a novel to make peace."
"I'm not talking about trauma," he continues, but about a complex relationship: "When as a child you have gone through a tough experience on the part of someone who should love you, we often turn to the story," he adds to give one of the keys to the literary tone.
Marín-Dòmine recalled that he was in Paris when Notre Dame burned and the fire made him “interrogate the gargoyles”, which gave a gothic tone to the first part of a then-incipient narrative, with a rereading of Lovecraft included. Later, while he was in Barcelona on a sabbatical, the outbreak of the pandemic prevented him from returning and he chose to stay, so he began to develop a second, more realistic part on the same floor where he had lived with his mother. .
Thus, if Con Fugir was the most beautiful thing we had (Club Editor, 2019) portrayed the life of his father, I will say that I have invented it will complete a family diptych from different perspectives.
Catalan version, here
