The Vietnam War and the arrival of the contraceptive pill shake up the journalists of Dana, a fashion magazine whose editorial office is in a black and white Madrid. The year was 1967 and everything was about to start changing, but we would still have to wait a little. Olga Ruiz in her first novel, The Editorial (Suma), recreates the life of those first women who became the eyes of many others who languished confined to their living rooms or their kitchens, it does not matter if these rooms were more or less less luxurious.
Those women who had to take care of their husbands and children following the mandates of other magazines, also women’s, that taught them to organize the menu for the week, to iron the bedding and to keep quiet – also to smile – so as not to make the others uncomfortable. sacrosanct providers of the home, they began to discover in Dana’s pages a world in the making, where perhaps there was a more interesting place for them.
He directs the magazine Telva, can we recognize anyone in the characters of The Editorial Office?
Everything is absolute fiction. To feel free and have fun writing I needed there to be no suspicion of settling scores or tributes.
How have you managed to write a 320-page novel while having a monthly closing of a monthly magazine like Telva?
It took me three years, against the advice of my writer friends who told me: “Don’t abandon it.” She wrote in a very feverish way for three weeks, and then she stopped because a hard period of work was coming, and then it took me twice as much effort to recover the tone. It has been a novel written in fits and starts.
Have you written a novel for women?
I don’t think there is feminine and masculine literature. And The Writing is certainly not a book for women. It tells a very interesting historical moment, how everything was about to wake up but these women were already very awake. Anyone who is interested in that period in Spain, but also likes crime novels, romance and espionage will enjoy this novel.
In your career, have you always had, like Dana’s director, “a third floor” inhabited by men where crucial decisions are made?
For a long time the noble floor, that is, the management floor, was full of men. So you had to go there to explain your job to them: why you had to go to Paris, why you had closed 21 appointments in a single day during a fashion week… they only saw the income statements. Now there are many women occupying positions in those plants.
When will there be a journalism award that recognizes the value of magazines? Why is it so difficult to recognize journalism made for women?
There have been specific recognitions, for example, to journalists such as Josefina Carabias (1908-1980), who infiltrated the Palace Hotel for eight days as a waitress to do a report. But in general there have been prejudices and a certain very testosteronic disdain towards this type of journalism. And there is a high level and there have been great magazines with excellent professionals. In Spain, thanks to magazines, women learned that in other European countries equal pay between men and women was legislated, or that the pill had been legalized, they also learned that they did not only go to the gynecologist when they were pregnant.
He says that ignorance has caused the world of magazines to be idealized and frivolized…
You hear things that never happened. They have told me, for example: “What a time, when champagne was drunk in the newsrooms!” I have never experienced that, nor have I always traveled in first class. What I have done is work a lot. Everything I know I have learned from talented women who worked in magazines, women with professional level and ambition who wanted to take on the world.
Why have magazines lost their prescribing power?
Journalism in general is in a trial and error process to make itself heard in a huge universe where there are many people making presumptive information and an audience that only reads headlines and seems unwilling to pay for quality information. That said, it is increasingly necessary to establish a hierarchy in the chaos of content on the Internet, where it is increasingly difficult to distinguish real content from synthetic content created by artificial intelligence, or from paid content. And then, there we will be again the magazines.
