On March 30, 2021, the writer and translator Núria Busquet (Cardedeu, 51 years old) appears desperate on TV3 news. He denounced the administrative odyssey for what was happening to ensure that the girl, who Aleshores was 13 years old, provided public health with adequate treatment for the eating disorder that caused her and that she felt she was one step away from death. “It’s because the girl died. Most of all, it’s because she died because of the apathy of the system. She’s desperate because she doesn’t have the ability to open a deal that could help her more and that we don’t have the money to access it,” he explained.
Four years later, with the world filling up at the end of 18 and facing an unhealed but stable front, Busquet has just published his five books, the third fiction: Family (Periscopes), in which he talks about his experience. In the pages of the novel there is anger, there is indignation, there is for, there is nostalgia for the irresponsibility of young people, there is a sense of guilt… But as the enemy of everything, there is also space for light, for poetry and for beauty, as if the author were paying vulgut retro homage to the title of that novel by Maggie Smith, You could make this place beautiful.
“With this book I wanted to reorder a piece of the mental scheme that I had created with my partner, from that idea of the heart that is a victim of society and that cries because I saved the girl. I wanted to look for who I was, apart from this, because this situation could not define my life, and also be a sort of ability to create from disaster, which in the end is what most writers do”, he explains.
ASK. Oh, later therapy, writing?
ANSWER. While he was looking for things that passed by, yes. But later, when we have to review and work, it will be very hard, but it is clear that a time has passed. I was with veure’m des de fora.
Q. To això al libre insistix so much that the protagonist is you and not you.
R. Exactly. I saw it as dissociated, because as time passed, the meva filla was a better, more stable mica, and therefore it was even better than what it was while I was writing, menys angoixada. I would like to thank you for how badly you have been.
Q. It is expected that when the child becomes a health problem, public health will respond…
R. The issue of public health and eating disorders is a great horror. The book doesn’t seem to be very accusatory, but the feeling I get is that we are the same with everyone. Hello, there is a lack of resources, that’s clear. But of course there is also a lack of interest. When you have many children with eating disorders, it is not possible to address the problem as if it were an individual, family or individual issue, which cannot be seen by society, nor by the world we live in, nor by the resources we have at our disposal. I see there is a parallel market for private clinics that benefit families’ most frustrating needs.
Q. He wrote: “The families with me will pay more money than we have, so we will not see our children die and we will also survive our lives. Hope is a cost and it is only for those who can pay.”
R. For me this part will be the most traumatic. There will come a time when you think, “I’m more worried about paying for the clinic than why it’s cured.” I discovered that we only paid 20% of the tuition and the rest was taken by the school insurance! Or he continued, that even more you feel like they are taking advantage of you, because they charge you much more than the value of the deal.
Q. Hi, there are two feelings very present in the novel. The first is guilt.
R. In the end, the seas are always at the center of all society’s problems, right? But most of all, a bad feeling like this always gives you the feeling that you, as a mother, have done something bad. But it’s clear, it doesn’t happen to all children, it only happens to some… I’m just saying that your mother, like you, is imbued with this idea that mental disorders have to do with education, with the way we live, where we don’t end up being guilty.
Q. The other feeling is loneliness. “Malaltia is also the solitude of the sea,” he wrote. I afegeix: “There is no more sun than a sea that suffers”.
R. It is a loneliness that is not felt so much in company (because I have my partner, I have my friends, I have the people who accompany me) as the feeling that no one can understand how he feels. In general it is very difficult to understand what it means to accompany a girl who is not vol cure and having to fight against everyone and everyone because she is cure. It is assumed that those who accompany people with certain addictions must experience something very similar, with the difference that, generally, those who have an addiction are older, while the youngest will start with anorexia at 12 years old, when a little girl faces.
Q. From Martina’s gang, tea two more fillings. At one point Donat wrote: “Somiar wakes up, somriure remembering what it was like not to be a mare. Not being able to imagine not being a mare.” Maternal ambivalence in its purest state.
R. In my house, my three children are teenagers. Adolescence is the most unpleasant stage of the child for a mother. De vegades et dius. “The mother who is about to give birth”, I think with the widow of this or that one who can’t satisfy you. I regret losing them. But now God: “I just can’t imagine my life without it.” This ambivalence is always very present in motherhood and fatherhood, and obviously not in parlem prou. I thought it would be fer-ho, also to warn future seas and peers, who know that this will happen and that it is part of normality. You also have the same thing, which you consider very interesting, and de vegades and you see yourself thinking about how serious your life is in her. I tried to play down this ambivalence, in the end I had no sense of humor at all.
Q. Speaking of adolescence, a very powerful reflection opens up into the open. Diu: “Ara, after so many children, I am surprised to adore myself that the bigger the fan, the more soc the seva mare, the more the faig is missing.” We tend to think that it is in early childhood that children need their peers most.
R. In adolescence they lose their independence and their peers become a horrible thing, the pitjor del món, public enemy number u; But now I’ve learned that I really need it, that I have to be there, since they obviously don’t want to be with me. For me això is a surprising thing about adolescence. I think there can be a lot of problems with teenagers, because I see that even the keys and keys that we have on our shoulders ended up feeling remade for them. You may need this: show your bug sen que tu els rebutgis, saber fin a que tips y puede hate sen que tu te odiïs alls.
Family
Núria Busquet Molist
Periscope
246 pages. 21 euros
This interview will originally be published in the section Moms and dads.
