Barcelona Metropolis

We are at Casa Fuster, the modernist building designed by architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner on Passeig de Gràcia. Now a luxury hotel, we sit on a maroon velvet sofa. On the small table in front of us are our coffees and Marta Orriols’ latest book, La possibilitat de dir-ne casa [That Place We Call Home] (Proa, 2023). Orriols (Sabadell, 1975) is also the author of Anatomia de les distàncies curtes [Anatomy of Short Distances], Aprendre a parlar amb les plantes [Learning to Talk to Plants] and Dolça introducció al caos [A Sweet Introduction to Chaos], all published by Periscopi. We talk about what lies both within and beyond her writing. Our conversation takes place in a room where tourists come and go, a setting that seems to resonate with one of the key themes of her latest novel: what it means to feel like a foreigner to yourself.

And that limbo can last a long time. We’re taught to progress through life’s stages: first, you study, then you get a job, and after that, you’re supposed to start a family. But life doesn’t work like that; it’s more about going with the flow. If you find yourself stuck in a limbo for a while, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s this pressure to always be achieving something, but there are times when it’s impossible to pursue goals because you’re lost, and you need time to find yourself again. That’s a little like what happens to the protagonist in the book. She escapes from Beirut in the middle of a personal and professional crisis and ends up in this limbo: I don’t know where I belong, and I don’t know where to go.

She believes she’ll find refuge there, but it doesn’t work out because the person who left isn’t the same as the one who has come back. I think everything depends on the circumstances – sometimes completely unexpected events can alter the course of what you had planned.

I handle it well, though I’ve come to realise that big changes scare me a lot. You hold on to a sense of security, and then suddenly, everything changes. But in the end, I’ve learned to see them as challenges.

Ugh, that’s another one: the number of Martas inside me. And the book explores a lot about who we are when we’re alone with ourselves.

Sometimes it feels like there’s a person inside us who, when you’re being praised for doing something well, suddenly speaks up and tells you that no, you’re a mess. It really annoys me. That’s the Marta I’d like to get rid of.

I have few friends, but I’ve known them for many years, and they tell me about this Marta who knows how to listen. In general, people tell me everything. That’s probably the Marta I like the most.

Yes, in the book, there’s this feeling of losing ourselves to become someone else. It often happens when you’re abroad; it’s like there’s another person inside you, one you don’t know yet, and you start to discover them when you’re far from your usual space and routine. You discover this person when you dare to try things you wouldn’t normally do at home, when you speak to strangers or do things you would never do in your own country. That distance, that shift from what’s familiar, helps you realise that you can be someone different from the person you are with your family, where everything is taken for granted.

Yes. You return from a place where you were free of filters, and when you come back here, you feel the need to put them back on, because you have to approach your family in a certain way. Life is an ongoing process of adapting to new circumstances.

It’s something I struggle with. I’ve stopped saying it now, but every time I was interviewed, I’d say that I didn’t feel like a writer, and my dad would scold me: “You shouldn’t say things like that, it’s not professional”. It’s hard because I think – and I don’t mean this in a humble way – that I still have a lot to learn. I feel like I’ve gotten this far largely by chance. I’m really grateful for how things are going, but I always think that when it’s over, it’ll be over. I won’t just keep churning out books one after the other. I only want to write when I genuinely have something to say.

Absolutely. I’ve been writing since I was very young, and I never once thought, “I want to be a writer, and I’ll get published”. I love the world of books; I even worked in a literary agency a long time ago. Due to certain circumstances, I distanced myself from it, and returning as a writer now means I’m always battling imposter syndrome. It sounds unbelievable, but honestly, that imposter syndrome is me. On the other hand, when I write, there are moments when I say: “Now this is it. Now I am truly myself, and I feel so at home in this space”. But when I hand the novel over to the editor, everything that follows feels like a suit that’s too big for me; I feel like I am really in disguise.

The world of literature gives you a platform, and it seems that you must be right simply because you’re a writer. I’m a person who hesitates a lot, and I use writing as a way to organise my thoughts. When I finish writing, I think, “That’s it, I’ve said everything”. I was reading an interview with Sally Rooney, where she said, “I feel like everything I needed to say, I’ve already said in the book”. Sometimes, there’s pressure to create a narrative around what you’ve written, but in my books, the plot is the least important part; what interests me are the contradictions, the doubts, all the things that might make you question things as you read. But when they put a label on me saying, “Marta has written a book about this, so she must understand it”, that’s not true.

Many times. But I’ve always written because I wanted to. I’ve never said to myself, “Now you have to write a novel because it’s expected of me”.

Yes, but it depends on how you understand literature. If you say, “I’m going to make this my profession, so now I have to write one book, then another”… But the real danger, more than writer’s block, is thinking, “I have a formula that works, so it’ll be fine”. It’s not that I want to write something completely different, but there are authors I really like who suddenly write a book that’s nothing like their previous work, and it pulls me out of my comfort zone. I’ve just finished a novel, and if I threw myself into it again, another idea would probably come to me, but I feel I need to take a break and appreciate what’s happened to me. It all started very serendipitously, books have come one after the other, but hold on: I used to have a job, and suddenly my world has shrunk to just writing, which is a luxury, but it’s harder than people think.

No, I’m doing some freelance work with a publishing house, editing here and there, but that’s it.

Not really. I’m a single mother with two children, so every day I have to do the shopping, make lunch and dinner, and pick them up from their training sessions. Besides, writing only flows when it flows, which doesn’t always happen. But yes, it’s a luxury to say that now I have the house to myself, and I can sit down to write instead of going to the office, which is what I had to do when I was writing my first and second books. I wrote at night, and I think I liked it more that way.

It was my escape: at night, when the children were asleep, I would disconnect from work, and it was that time of darkness, of contemplation, of writing. Now, it’s become a daily task that I do enjoy, of course, but it’s harder to find that sense of isolation and quiet I used to have. It’s funny, really, we’re never fully satisfied.

I had done all sorts of odd jobs, but I had spent almost ten years working in the postgraduate department of a university, where I acted as academic secretary, translator, we organised conferences… and I loved the team I worked with. The little coffee breaks by the machine were a real hub for stories. The thing is, to write, you have to live, and when you’re boxed in to just being a writer, the world sort of comes to a halt.

I never imagined I’d become a writer, but I’ve always written out of both pleasure and necessity, just for myself. I wanted to be an editor, but when the first editorial training programmes started appearing, my kids were very young, I was working, and I just couldn’t figure out where I’d find the time to study. I ended up at the Ateneu Barcelonès writing school because they offered an online narrative course. It wasn’t editing, but at least it was something related to literature, even if it was just at night, from home. After finishing the narrative course, I decided to keep training, this time focusing on short stories. The final project was to put together a collection of short stories. I didn’t finish the training due to personal circumstances, and one day, with a pile of short stories sitting in a drawer, I asked Periscopi if they’d be interested in reading any. That’s how it started.

You know, I thought many readers might shy away from this book, saying, “I’ve never lived abroad or been a correspondent”, but it’s actually a symbolic return – there are moments in life you can go back to. I would go back to a time before the father of my children passed away. It’s not that everything was perfect – we were struggling financially, and it was a hard life, but also a beautiful one. Sometimes I think about it, and I realise I wouldn’t want to go back to any other time except that one. But since I know I can’t, I think the life I have now is pretty good.

I’ve never really known what I am. We live in a time where it seems like everyone is expected to be able to start projects, businesses, and even now, at forty-nine, I catch myself thinking, “What if I sent my CV somewhere?”.

I don’t know, I want to study, I want to go to university, but when I look at the programmes, I think I couldn’t do it because I’d be out of the house all day. When I was young, I studied Art History because I liked it, but it was a huge mistake as I was a good student, and I could have studied something with more career potential. But I was young, super-romantic, and Art History didn’t get me anywhere. After that, I started doing master’s degrees and things related to cultural management, but none of that has materialised into anything either. And, for example, one job I would absolutely love is being an editor.

Yes, you can still do a thousand things. I went to the exhibition at the CCCB dedicated to Agnès Varda, and it really gave me the sense that she was truly happy, because she was doing what she loved, because she was so curious. And I suppose I am curious too, but I’m not very daring, and that’s a big flaw.

I think it’s essential, and with Tinder and the new ways we relate to each other, we’ve ruined it. Everything is so predictable now that nothing feels spontaneous anymore. And that phase of innocence, no matter how old we are, is beautiful, because it’s the art of the chase. Plus, it awakens a side of ourselves that’s usually dormant.

On Tinder, you choose someone who has already passed through many filters. But that sense of discovery, not knowing whether the other person wants the same thing as you, is precious and essential to my idea of love.

And it’s not always romantic love, but you meet someone and think: “I feel really good. But what are we? Friends? Is there something more? What makes one different from the other?”. The book touches on labels, which I understand are necessary, but sometimes they have this contradiction – they end up being little boxes: either you’re a friend, or you’re a lover.

Yes, sometimes the only thing that separates a friendship from love is the absence of sex. There’s a boundary, and there might be some attraction, but nothing will ever happen because there’s loyalty: we don’t cross it, because if we do, we’ll turn it into something else.

It’s very hard to accept that things have changed. Sometimes we have to turn the page, but we cling to the memory of what was once beautiful. We should be very realistic and objective, but when it comes to feelings, it’s really hard to be.

Life is hard for everyone. And it’s boring if we don’t fool ourselves. You have to create some expectations, some excitement, and that’s what happens to her.

My mum. We get on pretty well, but she’s not the person I feel closest to. She’s not distant, but she finds it harder to connect with me. When I start talking about deeper things, she gets a bit overwhelmed, because she’s from that generation that struggles to talk about feelings. But, then again, whenever something good happens to me, I always call her. Always.

Yes, the protagonist has been away from her family, and as an excuse, she says she’s coming back because her parents are getting older. But when she arrives, she realises it’s not an excuse, it’s the truth. And that’s hard to admit. Even though my parents are still young, it’s inevitable to think they’re getting older. Since I turned forty-five, I haven’t coped well with getting older. I used to love it; now I feel like life is speeding by too quickly. So quickly that it scares me. The last time I went to renew my driving licence, ten years ago, I laughed, thinking that the next time I’d go, I’d be fifty. And then, suddenly, I went the other day and thought, “What if they don’t renew it next time?”. Or my son, for example: he turned twenty the other day, and it really hit me. The only conclusion I’ve come to is that I love life so much, and I don’t want to leave. We only pass through here once, I still don’t understand anything, and I want to understand it all.