Marta Marín-Dòmine (Barcelona, ??1956), director of the Born Center for Culture and Memory, is the winner of the 43rd BBVA Sant Joan award with Diré que m’ho he inventa, a novel “based on real events” around ‘a complex and tough mother-daughter relationship that Edicions 62 will publish on August 30. The award is endowed with 35,000 euros tax-free and does not correspond to copyright. The award was presented yesterday evening during an event in the modernist salon of the Fundació 1859 Caixa Sabadell.
The Catalan-Canadian writer acknowledged yesterday that the book is “a reflection and dialogue with the mother with whom I could not establish an ideal relationship”, written “with the will to be sincere to the extent that my ethics allowed me”.
Marín-Dòmine explains that it is a tough text in which he dares to explore the bad relationship between a daughter who is no longer young and a mother who “has a mental disposition close to madness”, and which questions femininity and motherhood critically, trying to avoid clichés.
He remembered his mother as “a French woman of working-class extraction, with bourgeois tastes and a desire to advance socially that she cannot satisfy and who runs into the way of being here during the Franco regime, who despite everything is finding the her way but that when she finds a way as an actress, she is crushed with the birth of her daughter”, with the frustration that this entails.
The author also insisted that, despite the opinion of many critics, she believes that autofiction is not narcissistic but rather the opposite: “The author surrenders his self because he feels that what he narrates is a shared experience” . In any case, his account allows itself the fictionalization and even the exaggeration of its history, while also claiming on the one hand acceptance and on the other forgetting, but “that the book does not want be a reconciliation to smooth the edges, because it would run the risk of sugarcoating”, “it is not a novel to make peace”.
“I’m not talking about trauma”, he continues, but about a complex relationship: “When we’ve been through a hard experience as a child on the part of the one who should love us, we often turn to the story”, he adds to give one of the keys of the literary tone.
Marín-Dòmine remembered that she was in Paris when Notre-Dame burned down and the fire made her “question the gargoyles”, which gave a gothic tone to the first part of a then incipient narrative, with a rereading of Lovecraft including Later, while he was in Barcelona on sabbatical, the outbreak of the pandemic prevented him from returning and he chose to stay there, so he set about developing a more realistic second part in the same flat where he had lived with his mother.
Thus, if Fugir was the most beautiful thing we had (Club Editor, 2019) portrayed the life of the father, I will say I made it up will complete a family diptych from different perspectives.
