He has stripped down to write. Literally. Unclothed. Like one of the characters in his latest novel, Bocabesada, Juan del Val likes to provoke and provoke himself. We often see it in his appearances on television programs, such as El Hormiguero, which his wife Nuria Roca presents. “On TV I don’t play a character, it’s me, but incomplete,” she warns, “because there is no time, it’s another format.” It is in his novels where he strips himself completely naked, in this case, metaphorically. “You can see my sensitivity, my way of being in the world,” he explains. Writing on leather doesn’t work. “It’s completely absurd,” he says after experiencing it. “I try, I tempt myself.”
And it is also tempting to look for the parallels that exist between Martín Varela, that writer who appears in the novel, full of intersecting lives, along with a good handful of characters, just as Del Val likes. “What happened with Martín is not a coincidence, I have done it in a premeditated and even perverse way.” So, in addition to being a writer, his alter ego also loves New York, he hates the professional Pasapalabra contestants and collaborates on a successful late-night television show, which he ends up abandoning out of boredom. At the moment, this is not the case for him: “I will leave TV with complete certainty, or they will kick me out; “What I will do all my life is write,” he says.
He assumes fame (“which has the importance it has, which is little”) because he always prefers to keep the good in things. “Simplifying a lot, it allows you to regularly get a good table in restaurants, you feel recognized, it boosts your ego.” And he admits openly: “I have a huge ego, but I am not a narcissist, I have had many psychoanalyses behind me and my ego does not bother me or others.” Of course, for him, it is essential to create. “Without ego, you don’t write novels, you don’t appear on TV or you do anything.”
When he writes, another of Del Val’s essential requirements is to know very well what he is about. That is why he focuses the action of the novel on a television production company specialized in series for platforms. “I generally write what I experience,” he says. And he even goes further: “Everything I do, I do to write.”
When he picks up the thread of the story, any corner and any moment is suitable for a novel, although he usually gets serious in a small apartment he has, thus fleeing the hubbub of the home he shares with Nuria Roca, two dogs, and his three children (Juan , Pau and Olivia) and all the friends they usually bring home. “I have very sociable children,” he smiles satisfied. The oldest, 21 years old and a student of Advertising and Marketing, is making his way as a TikToker with a profile that already exceeds 100,000 followers. “I don’t know very well what he does because I keep a distance from social networks,” he reveals. On the other hand, he assures that he is very careful that his children do not feel the pressure of having the last name Del Val Roca. “We, as a family, basically laugh.”
Nuria is always his first reader, the one who reviews the chapters as they finish and the one who gives him a first honest opinion that he takes into account. “We share everything,” he says. “In January we will have lived together for 25 years,” he announces proudly. What they have stopped sharing, however, is the experience of writing a book with four hands. “I will never write with a partner again,” Del Val emphatically states, using these three adjectives to describe the long relationship they have: “fabulous, fantastic and basic.”
For him, success is very simple: “You just have to be aware of the other person and like them. The day you stop liking it, you have to leave it, it’s an obligation.” And although they are about to celebrate a quarter of a century together, he assures that, for them, their relationship has “a certain sense of provisionality, that is, it could end tomorrow.” Now, for now, he certifies that they continue to laugh a lot and that their anger lasts at most half an hour. Regarding the question of whether or not they have an open relationship, he remains ambiguous “to avoid simplifications.” What does count is that for him, fidelity is something “anecdotal”, a moral value that “I have never understood.”
Although she is still promoting Bocabesada, whose reception has led her to be among the best sellers on Planeta’s fiction list, she is already thinking about her next novel. “I would like it to deal with social differences, but not from the cliché,” she advances. At the moment, she has already closed a contract with the publishing house that José Manuel Lara founded. For the first time, she has signed a clause in which he agrees not to use artificial intelligence in the creation of the work. “I loved signing it. What’s more, the author who used it would be sentenced to prison,” she points out.
For him, one should write honestly and not pursue transcendence. “I’m looking for something infinitely simpler, which is to entertain.” And he adds: “Those who discredit entertainment and place themselves on a higher level intellectually make me laugh.” He is aware that “right now I am a media personality and a writer who sells, and I am valued based on this.” And he concludes defiantly: “In 30 or 50 years we will see where those who have prestige today have remained and where those who do not. Unfortunately, I will have died by now to see it.”
