The journalist Mariola Cubells (València, 1967) was only 55 years old when she was commissioned to write a book about women in their 60s. At first she was scared. Nobody is here to be given five years at once. But later she saw that it was a good way to write the book that she and her friends needed, a book that she describes as “luminous.”
In Better than ever. Happy, unbeatable and pioneers (Espasa) traces a chronicle, a conversation more than an essay, about the past, present and future of a generation, hers, born in the mid-sixties that grew up in democracy, without having to fight already for some rights that their elders fought for, but forced, in some way, to do things that they had not been educated to do – abort, get divorced, live alone – and that now they also find themselves inventing a new way of growing old.
This assignment came to him and he was scared.
At first I was a little blocked because I had only written about the audiovisual world and I considered that I didn’t have much to say. But it was about putting myself in and discovering the vein. There I saw that we are a collective, a tribe with common elements. And it has been a fascinating journey. The book has given me something that I thought I didn’t lack: courage. And be careful, I don’t have imposter syndrome and I’m not insecure. But there were things that were difficult for me, giving my opinion on certain topics, and I have found myself able to construct an opinion and express it without complexes. Then I have been able to mix the experiential with the reflections and with what I have read. The book is a conversation with friends and with the books I have read, because there is an ambitious and prodigious literary corpus that I have been able to draw on.
Would there be a similar book focused on men? Would it be commissioned by an author like you? Would it find its audience?
Absolutely. They do not consider themselves part of a group. They are in the world, we have explored an unknown land. That book would not exist because neither the publisher, nor the author, nor the public consider it.
We are different from them, we form a different collective, we have done different things and we do different things. I have also talked to men for the book. And there are things that have surprised me. The mental load, for example, they don’t get it. When you explain it to them, they don’t understand much and those who do understand it admit that they don’t have it.
Do you feel that women of your generation believe that they have moved forward and left men behind?
They have explored, out of obligation, a territory that they have not had to explore. They have had it easy and now they are bewildered, because they feel like they are not understanding things. There are some who are prepared to understand and others who have barricaded themselves in their world. What I notice most is the confusion. We also have to understand that we have had that need or that concern. Although I have the feeling of not having fought to get rights. I didn’t have any problems going to university, getting married and getting divorced. If I had wanted to have an abortion I could have done so. I think I have broken molds that no one had broken in my family and I have been moving in a direction for which I was not educated. I did not have any lack, I did not have any need to fight for any right, because I was educated in democracy, but I do have the feeling of having broken molds and of having consolidated myself in an ecosystem that was not made for me. My daughter is going to want the life that I have, I don’t want my mother’s life. This is systematically repeated in the book.
Indeed, almost all of the women she talks to in the book have constructed themselves in opposition to their mothers. “I don’t know what I want to do in life but I know I don’t want to be like my mother.”
In that, the book has given me peace and lucidity, because sometimes I felt like I was alone in this and I felt a certain guilt. My mother is wonderful! I recognize that I have understood my mother more in the last ten years of my life than before, and despite that I do not want to be like her. They, who are now between 80 and 90 years old, are indeed the generation lost and crushed by Francoism.
No reproaches from the children, then?
There are daughters of women who are now 60 who reproach their mothers for things, but when they reach adulthood they will realize that it is fantastic to have had independent, adult mothers, because they will be more bearable in old age. We no longer have a feeling of guilt. I really like the concept of the mediocre mother by the French philosopher Elizabeth Badinter. There is nothing that she has ever really wanted to do in life that she has stopped doing because of having a daughter. It is true that my daughter has had a fabulous father and that is important, but you also have to know how to choose the father of your children. My daughter’s and my adolescence are quite similar, but our relationship has nothing to do with the one I had with my mother. I spent my life lying to my mother.
The common thread of the book is: “the first ones.”
That image seems fundamental to me, we were the last generation that has been educated in patriarchy that has no longer educated its children that way. Those people educated us like this and we have been the first in everything.
They have to invent a new way of aging.
And in that we open a path. You now see women of that age who aesthetically have nothing to do with it. 30 years ago a 60-year-old woman was an old woman.
There is a moment in the book where he says: “I have talked with sociologists, nurses, political jurists, pathologists, lawyers, professors, rentiers too.” There is a class bias in the book. I don’t know if she worried him. Among women of her generation, perhaps even more than others, there is a serious class gap.
That worried me a lot and I decided that I had to focus on what I know. This book is focused on an enlightened middle class that has had class privileges, because otherwise I was going to get into territory that I don’t know. Yes, there are some touches. Dr. Carme Valls, author of books such as Invisible Women for Medicine and Women, Health and Power, told me something that drove me crazy. When these women come to her consultation, selfless women, very dedicated to caring, she recommends that they start by taking an hour a day for themselves. I said: an hour alone? Then I thought about my mother, who never had an hour to herself that wasn’t related to us or the domestic.
Now there is talk of the epidemic of male loneliness, that it is more difficult for men to reach maturity with a network of affections.
I think heterosexual men have a harder time building emotional bonds in intimacy. The relationship between us is face to face, theirs is shoulder to shoulder, looking at something. I never imagine a scene of four men confiding in each other in an environment that is not very testosterone-containing. But that’s not my problem, they’ll have to solve it for themselves.
You are a cultural critic. The audience of women over 60 is very large. Everyone knows that they support movie theaters, book clubs, a large part of the publishing industry… but there are still labels like “tietes movie.” They are a reviled public, not exactly desirable.
I am also very positive there. Until now, talking about women over 60 was thinking about a range, but they don’t realize that this is not the case, we are on a different wavelength. It has nothing to do with it. The public and the industry need to stop using those terms and stop being condescending.
He deals with many scriptwriters and audiovisual creators. Do you still think like this, “this is a product for ladies” or “this is NOT a product for ladies”, thinking that this emphasizes your ambition?
I think it is not the creators who think this way, but the leaders. I argue a lot with casting directors about this phenomenon that I talk about in the book, which consists of placing a 35-year-old woman as the mother of a 20-year-old actor. In the last season of Elite there is an Argentine protagonist, Valentina Zenere. The actress who plays her mother, Luz Cipriota, in real life is only eleven years older. When I saw them on Instagram I thought they were going to play two sisters. But no, one acts as the other’s mother. Then the girl’s father is Leonardo Sbaraglia, who is 55. That sends a disastrous message. I ask the casting directors why and they tell me: “the market demands it.” Who is the market? Let’s all rebel. The 50-year-old ladies have 18-year-old and nine-year-old children.
It is something that has to be broken, but I am optimistic, because it is no longer sustained. I really understand actresses, who live an intimate drama and for many their next role depends on an operation. I can’t stand it when I hear those comments like “how are you growing up?” If she had surgery, they would say: “how operated she is.” Let us live! If we didn’t have that pressure we would all relax and it is much worse for people who have a public image.
It says in the book: “Romantic love ends, for the good of all.”
There my head has exploded a little from all the books I have read. It is a social construction that has done us a lot of harm. It is being reviewed and it is something I love. I read The End of Love by Vivian Gornick and I had never thought about that. That romantic love was something so capitalist and conservative that they had shoehorned it into us. I think that is also being dismantled and we women have also done it, making it less important.
But women of her generation have lived with the pressure of having a partner.
I have friends who 15 or 20 years ago were desperate thinking that if they were alone it was the worst thing that could happen to them, and now they are not.
Because they had gone through menopause and were in another stage of life or why had they made that reflection?
I think that because they have made that reflection, that is in the air. You have to be clear that a partner is overrated, that nothing happens if you don’t have one. The same thing that happened with motherhood, you could choose to be a mother and now you can choose to be alone. If you are alone, you are fine alone, you do not feel frustrated or a failure. They have hammered us with messages from everywhere, regardless of what we experienced when we were children. Despite being clear that we have seen absolutely unhappy marriages. There is something in the environment that makes us breathe better. Falling in love is great, but you can’t idealize it anymore.
Does the system accept a desiring and desirable 60-year-old woman well?
I have a lot of doubts, because I have many friends with different ideas about it. I believe that women who are still desiring fulfill their desire. What happens is that you become more selective.
What I don’t believe in at all is the theory of invisibility. It is a deeply patriarchal and sexist term that turns us into objects. When we talk about invisibility we always talk about sexual invisibility, because the other one, the work one, the social one, the friendly one, I don’t see it as much. That mantra, which many women also repeat, “women become invisible,” must stop saying it. This especially worries me. You have to get out of that scheme of the male gaze, that if the man doesn’t see you you are invisible. And what does it mean? That you stop being visible to the slugs, that doesn’t matter to me. That you stop being visible to your partner and he’s going to go with a 25-year-old girl? Well, let her go.
Is sexual fluidity a pending issue in this generation? Recently a friend, the son of a widowed woman, told me: now they are not ready, but in the next generation single women will mate with each other.
I’ve thought about it and I don’t have an opinion. It is true that in the book I talk about heterosexual women because the lesbian world escapes me, but I will tell you that I see them as capable. Without going any further, I, who am not a lesbian, would see myself as more capable of having a sexual relationship with a woman who interests me than with a man for the mere fact of being one.
I think we are going to a world full of women, there are many of us, we are clear that we are going to age well and we are going to grow old together, we are independent, we are safe, we do not need the support of men for anything anymore.
The alternative to getting older is not getting older, and it’s much worse. There are also a series of absences in the book. His sister-in-law Eva, who died two years ago, and was his best friend. Carmen Alborch and her friend, TVE journalist Alicia Gómez Montano, are also there.
Ah, Carmen. She was so modern, so pioneering, she was the woman I aspired to be. All the reflections that I make in the book she made before in that groundbreaking trilogy of books: Alone, Free and Bad. I have been in dialogue with all of them and this has led me to think two things. One, I have had a great life and therefore I am less afraid of death than ever. If I have to die, I have had a great life. And two, I was thinking of growing old with Eva, she was my friend since I was ten, it was very clear that we were going to do it. Not having her causes me total emptiness and pain, but it also makes me angry because I think that I have to live for both of us. It’s like a duty, she was a deeply vital, optimistic, courageous, luminous person… I am the person I am in part thanks to all the years we spent together. You build yourself with everything that people give you. I am proud that she was part of my life in such a resounding way and to have built such a strong love relationship. I owe all that and now I have two objectives. Pursue pleasure and joy. Not happiness. And that’s all I’m going to do from here until she dies on me. I was able to write this book thanks to all these people.
