Jarred McGinnis (born in New Mexico, 57 years old) is a writer in a wheelchair who writes a novel about a young man who, like himself, has been in a traffic accident that has left him a paraplegic. The injured person is also called Jarred, but it's not him... although he is (in part): "It's a novel and I wanted people to be clear that it's a novel and not think , in no case, that it was a memoir or an essay. But as an author with a disability who writes about a disability, it was clear that I would be associated with this character, no matter what name I gave him." Therefore, Jarred (McGinnis) decided that the young man would also be called Jarred.
The novel in question is El covard (Periscope) and narrates the experience of this Jarred during the first months in a wheelchair. Jarred (McGinnis) had to "remember what it felt like in those early days, which is what the book portrays", because he suffered the accident twenty years ago.
He didn't write it as personal therapy, but it served him: "I don't think writing is therapeutic, it doesn't have to be, but in this situation it was. Writing this book also allowed me to appease a lot of ghosts, because it made me think about a disability that I didn't have, because I spent too much time thinking that I was disabled. And here literature as an artistic formula has great strength, because it allows you to explore in depth human psychology and the weight of consciousness. For me it was a kind of therapy and I hope that it also helps people who don't have any disabilities to understand it a little."
A situation, that of being paraplegic, which is shown without embellishment or self-pity, because the book is full of grotesque situations or dark humor that, perhaps, only a disabled person could write: "It's hard for Jarred to know that others they are treating him as a disabled person, when his mind is not disabled, it is only the body. And it's fascinating. I keep dreaming that I'm walking, and that fascinates me. There is something in my brain that still sees my identity as a non-disabled body."
But the novel goes much further and portrays the fragility of the relationship between a father (Jack) and a son, who have not dealt with each other for years and now have to do it... with a wheelchair in the middle . Both have changed over time, but time is what they need to accept each other. Jarred's bravado and impertinence put the reader more on Jack's side: “Jarred really is a heavy and it is because he is experiencing grief and sorrow and enormous guilt. He is a destroyed man; it was already, shattered. I hope that the readers will tolerate him, so that they understand where this pain comes from, but at the same time, you will also have seen that Jack is super patient, very kind to him and, therefore, I hope that the reader will identify with him. Then, when you discover Jack's past, you also begin to better understand Jarred and why he's going through this pain. It's a love story between father and son, who love each other, but the family is torn apart."
Much of the possibility of reconciliation depends on a person who is already dead, Jarred's mother and Jack's wife, whom they both remember with different fondness. And part of Jack's penance and recovery depends on the hours he spends in a kind of sanctuary where he heals from his wounds: in the greenhouse, growing orchids: "Jack stops drinking because he transferred this need to drink to having care of flowers, orchids. And when Jarred returns, Jack does what he knows worked for him; she's trying to get Jarred interested in orchids and there are these moments where they're together and working together, instead of fighting."
This fondness for orchids comes from his great-grandfather, who was a gardener and who invented a “very difficult” variety, the Richard Muller, named after his brother. It is likely that he has some first memories of entering his greenhouse and that is why wherever I travel I always look for this orchid”.
The delicacy of these plants symbolizes the fragility of the relationship between father and son and how the efforts to live together are stitched and paraded. At one point in the book, McGinnis comes to say that being a father means continuously shitting her: “Hahaha. It sounds much better in Catalan and I will change it to the English version, so that it comes out in Catalan", says McGinnis, who values the work of the translator, Anna Llisterri: "All my thanks and admiration for the translator, because in the end it is her work, because from dialogues that are very American there is a very specific way of how father and son talk. And if it came to you in Catalan, it means that the translator understood the book well and did a good job."
The novel is a "roller coaster of emotions", and although everything happens in a very normal family, the characters have been on the verge of crime or the transgression of social norms. When asked how he managed to fit them in, McGinnis, who is an American with British nationality and lives in Marseille, is definitive: “The United States is already a pretty extreme place in itself . It is easy to fall outside these boundaries in the United States, yes. But these stories exist and I think they really need to be told. I have always liked small lives very much. I think we all have traumas in our lives; mine is more obvious. So I'm interested in trauma, I think we all have it and we should talk about it, instead of pretending it doesn't exist. We have to be comfortable with our vulnerability."
