For Silvia Hidalgo (Seville, 1978), writing is the best medicine. When she's sick, she can't open the computer, but she can take a notepad and start jotting down ideas. Sometimes, it doesn't shape them and they stay in that, in ideas. But others, he develops them and they become a novel that ends up winning the Tusquets prize. This is what happened to Nada que decir, which won this award in September and has just arrived in bookshops. "I was coming back from a trip and I was exhausted. My throat hurt and I had a little fever. A writer friend recommended that I write something, which would help me feel better. And I paid attention to it."
I had no plot in mind. It wasn't even in my mind to write a book. This writing was meant to be nothing more than a remedy for discomfort. But a protagonist emerged with whom she felt identified, and she decided to continue. "It was born from my view of today's world. I based it on my own experiences and those of my friends. It's less difficult for us to open up than for men, and we've learned to talk about our frailties naturally."
I would never have imagined that a story like this could win an award. "15 years ago it would have been unthinkable that such visibility would be given to the story of a non-conformist woman who moves in the waters of anger, and not exclusively of sadness. In a discussion, the woman is expected to mediate. An exercise in containment that does us no good and to which I say enough".
Hidalgo was clear that his references were "women who look like Gena Rowlands". Since he didn't find all the examples he would have liked in fiction, he wrote his own.
Her identity doesn't matter, and neither does her past and her until recently perfect family. Her life partner is now her ex-husband, whom she only sees when she picks up her daughter and who barely glances at him. He is too hung up on cell phone notifications. The uncertainty of knowing whether or not she will have a date with a stranger keeps her heartbroken. Everything is useful if it is to forget a man. But it's not her ex-husband, who she has to put away from her thoughts, but his co-worker, with whom she had an affair that left her upset. “He feels that he is not in control of his life and therefore decides to take control of it. You can make a mistake, but she wants to make a mistake."
The writer explains: "I followed the protagonist closely, so I got angry when she got angry, I laughed and I also shed some tears." It happened to him when he finished the manuscript and sent it to the competition “a few minutes before the deadline. I felt so proud of myself, that I took a selfie to remind myself that I can get away with it. It's an exercise we should do more often."
