Juan José Millás: “Old age is full of mystery and confusion; it’s an unknown country.”

Juan José Millás (Valencia, 1946) returns to the world of autofiction, to an older Juan José Millás who must write his last major report, to a young Juan José Millás who believes he has two fathers, to a Juan José Millás in the seminary, at university during the anti-Franco struggle, as a psychoanalyst, in the strangeness of old age. To a novel where it is unclear who ends up being written by whom. In other words, to his eternal themes: identity, splitting, dreams, the boundary between fiction and reality, and the power of language to shape our lives. It is That Idiot Is Going to Write a Novel (Alfaguara), a novel about friends lost along the way, heroes and traitors in the student struggle, and the fantasies of other fathers, other lives.

“Every writer has three or four themes that run through their novels, that obsess us, and that we spend our lives writing about because we've never fully resolved them. And the issue of identity runs through all my work and takes on greater importance at my age, because one wonders to what extent one has been the master of oneself or one's master, to what extent my life has been the product of planning or the product of the chance of what others have planned, to what extent I have acted or have been acted upon,” Millás reflects.

"You spend half your life creating an identity, and the other half deconstructing it; at a certain age, you should be called Desjuanjo."

And he emphasizes that “identity is a very fragile thing. In fact, you die and disappear. You say, damn, if identity were that important, one would die, but identity would still exist somewhere, right? One spends half of one's life constructing an identity, and the other half deconstructing it. After a certain age, they should call me Desjuanjo, and you Desjusto, because the era of deconstruction has already begun. You can't accumulate more identity. You realize that identity is super fragile when you see those events with soldiers covered in medals, with their bodies covered in junk, and you say, if they need so many to secure their identity, how fragile identity must be. Or when you walk into one of those doctor's offices full of diplomas of I don't know what, seminars of I don't know what. I don't think they reassure me much, I think: you must not be very sure of yourself if you need all those certificates.”

Millás's own character, uncomfortable and out of step with the world, is also not lacking in security. “From that discomfort comes writing. There is no writing without conflict. In the novel, the idea of bastardy appears, being someone's illegitimate child. And I'm very interested in that. Based on a well-known article by Freud, *The Family Novel of Neurotics *, in which he points out that most people have fantasized that their parents weren't their parents, but rather the children of Swedish princes who would at some point come to rescue us from the condition into which we had fallen, the French writer Marthe Robert concluded that there are only two kinds of literature: that of the one who writes with the awareness of being a bastard and that of the legitimate. The true kind would be that of the bastard: it calls everything into question. The legitimate kind, what is he going to write? The Penal Code. You can only write from discomfort with the world, with yourself.”

“If you had a teenage son who, on a Saturday at seven in the evening, you saw that he wasn't going out and told you he was going to stay up reading 'Crime and Punishment', what a fit of terror!”

And he says that "the discomfort in my case has been constitutional because since I was a child I had a poor relationship with reality, I had few resources to navigate it. That strangeness has driven me to write, but I'd even say that you can only read from it. It's really funny when I'm at the Book Fair and parents with teenage children come up to me and want them to be readers, and I throw my hands up in horror. If you had a teenage son who, on a Saturday at seven in the evening, you see he's not coming out and he tells you he's going to stay up reading Crime and Punishment , what a fit of terror! Because to read, you also have to have a discomfort with the world, and reading acts as a calming agent."

Millás talks about the importance of psychoanalysis in his life—“it enhances your associative capacity, and if writing is anything, it's an exercise in association”—and about religion and his time in seminary: “Religion, God, has played a very important role in my life, and I wonder if literature has been able to replace that.” He also mentions a phrase from the book, “abandoned in the land of old age.” “It's a land where nothing is predictable, where things happen, but you don't know why. An unknown land. Cheever says in his diaries that in old age there is mystery and confusion. The diary of an adolescent could begin like that, and old age is also dominated by mystery and confusion. We die in a land even stranger than the one we lived in.”