A glass eye and then the book you've published is Hezur erretura. Has this influenced you?

I remember when Hasier Etxeberria interviewed me in Sautrelan asking me how I was going to deal with my next project. I replied more or less that I didn’t know, that life would give me what to write, and that even then – I don’t know if paraphrasing Pessoa or Rilke – I would put my heart in the papers. With this simplistic statement, I wanted to say that I would put the best of myself, that something else would be the size of achievement. The truth is, when I've been writing this book, I've always kept in mind that I had to face a new challenge, but I couldn't repeat the format, even if it was a successful format.

No doubt, these bones come from that eye. For example, the topic of memory, the inquiry into memories to understand our present, the principle of all this is in that book. There are other links: to use other literature citations as authority arguments, reflections on writing...

Did you start burning bones before you knew you were burning bones? Or, more clearly, how did he begin to write this book?

From the beginning I had the intuition that in the title the bones would appear, because that element could follow the scheme of my trajectory: the skin, the hands, the eye... The influence of time on us, bones, or the weight of life, bone pain.

The idea was to create loose stories. Then, as I wrote, and with some readings, I gradually began to imagine a larger piece, a continuum built alternating the present and the past.

And how has the process of elaborating this continuum gone?

It has been very laborious, especially because I wanted to create an echo network to give cohesion and reliability to the work. That is why contextual references, social environment data and other aspects are repeated from time to time: rats, dreams, signals, places and characters… To make an amalgam, without it becoming something artificial and keeping the balance.

In the book, in one of the letters sent to Nadine, the protagonist tells him that writing for him is to stand on a raft and try to maintain the balance, which is what the river gives him, putting the raft, and paddle, because if not, the stick is wrapped in the mud. In this sense, I'm practical, because I lead to the role of many circumstances in my life.

The image of the fireplace seemed very productive.

By "reture," I mean "writing," because it's a transformation. Take a raw material, whatever it is, the root or the stone or the fruit, and smoke. You will turn that matter into something different, ashes; and, on a literary level, into text. But in doing so, in addition, there is another kind of energy. In the book there is spirit, the will to reach force. In this sense, to retreat, as for the character is to clean up the surpluses and the ashes, for me is to empower myself as a writer, to overcome the difficulties of life.

Difficulties make the book have a great sense of humor and irony. For example, here: “I wasn’t at my best, far from it, but if I was able to participate in the lipdub of the Korrika, the day after the farewell, to the top and go ahead”

Just before that phrase, the character says that the pain can't be allowed to take over. Despite the size of the wounds, we must learn to rise faster and faster. This is an explicit message for women. In the story La vita è bella – ironic title – it is said that the beauty of life is the exercise that makes us depart from perdition. By comparison, the protagonist of a crystal eye suffered a lot, but sought his freedom with dignity and, in part, writing helped him move forward. The other protagonist looks like him, but he laughs more, is more demanding with others and is more radical.

In the presentation, they said it was a narrative book, but they told you that you could read it as a novel. I myself am with the second: it has given me the impression of a whole and coherent thing. Are you worried about the need to label?

I am less and less concerned about labels and classifications. My concern, the authentic one, is to produce a good book, a book that mixes with the emotions, reflections and feelings of the reader and that gives it an aesthetic enjoyment.

As Editor Leire Ziluaga said in her introduction, the book contains several narratives: letters, newspapers… She said that it is the genres that women have written that have been undervalued. Did you want to make an effort to emerge from those ideas?

Yes, when I met Leire for the first time I told him my three premises: one, that the book would have a fictionalized tone of memory and another, that I wanted to make our classic concept of stories more flexible. For example, the Dream Inventory is not a narrative about structure, but in its simplicity it includes many accounts. And the third is that in the history of literature, there would appear forms that the canon has not estimated, the day to day and the letters, and autobiographical style narratives. These are genres mostly used by women, which have been viewed from the perspective of their belonging to the sphere of intimacy.

And where does the idea come from?

With Josune Muñoz, in the Skolastika workshops, I realized that these genera have been considered sub-genres and that, therefore, many women have stopped taking into account in the history of literature. The view used by the criticism has been very limited, as in most cases women have underestimated what they had said from their point of view.

You quoted me in Miramar, right where the book begins. In the presentation of the book you said: It would be “disheartening” if people, in their protagonist, only saw the author. What view do you have of those limits between author, fiction and autofiction?

It starts and ends in Miramar to point out that a cycle has been carried out.

Since I began to write my first works, I have had the feeling that I would always drink of my life, in other words, with today’s words, my line, direct or indirect, would be the “literature of the self”. Any ordinary life can be revalued through literary writing. Self-imitation, self-imitation, autobiography -- I waste time in this kind of debate telling myself that writing is either an exercise in freedom or it's nothing. For presentations, readers' clubs, conversations, it is necessary to have a basic discourse, an argumentative, to sort out each one's ideas, but otherwise it doesn't matter. In addition, readers are always tempted to see the author at one end or the other.

In my case, I am aware that there is a vague border between the author and the protagonist, and that is so, intentionally, because it is my natural line. It is also the influence of the charm of Annie Ernaux. Anyway, in this book there are many more fictions than in the previous one. The axes, times, places, materials, are more numerous. And I'm partly the protagonist, but also other girls, teenagers and women of my generation. Next year, after taking out the book of poems that I've been writing, maybe it's my new challenge to write something that's not autofiction, or autobiography.

Do you think it's a fashion?

The word fashion is dangerous, because it has a frivolity point and a touch of speed. I would say that it is in force, and I am pleased about that. According to Laura Freixas, everything is autobiography, with a biographical base of 1% to 99%. But it cannot be denied that at a time when reality cannot be accurately captured, despite the greater will for loyalty, it becomes fiction. Life is an ungraspable spider web, which is dissolved or distorted when it begins to be picked up with the pen.