“I believe that the key to happiness is to accept that you are going to do few things in life”

Imagine a novel with this plot: a writer dedicates his life to collecting moments of tragedy, deep sadness or even small disappointments in the lives of his colleagues who went down in history―the so-called classics―; he takes the information and puts together narratives where he establishes causes and effects as to why these subjects lived, and died, under the shadow of misfortune. The writer does his thing in a cafeteria, accompanied by people so he doesn’t feel so alone, but already at home, in those moments where work seeps into everyday life, the knowledge of those existences makes him question his own. If not, it will be him, too, a wretch.

In real life javier pena He does not have such a debate because he knows he is unhappy, but he does not assume it as something bad. Knowledge of her situation makes her have a human approach to create the episodes of “Great Unhappy” (Blackie Books), a podcast where she uses fictional resources to narrate the lives of her literary teachers. With fifteen episodes over three seasons, the program tells the lives of authors as notable and diverse as Patricia Highsmith, Roberto Bolaño, Virginia Woolf and Juan Rulfo from the tragedies that marked them. Sometimes these tragedies start from the random, others have their own name. And some others are a sum of context and opportunity. A dark opportunity that sometimes jumps out and makes you change your path, or at least your rhythm.

“There is that famous phrase, that ‘we are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.’ Well, we cannot forget the giants who have done everything we write about now, which is thanks to the paths they have opened. I think of the episode dedicated to Virginia Wolf, on her role as a pioneer of feminism and literary modernism, [sin ella] we would not be what we are now. It’s always good to revisit those classics.” Peña tells El Comercio in an interview via Zoom.

Among the titans whose life the podcast narrated is the Japanese Yukio Mishima, whose sepukku (ritual suicide misnamed “harakiri”) is related to when he was raised by his longing grandmother for a Japan that no longer existed, as well as the fact that he fled the service military and that his country surrendered after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mishima demanded impeccable conduct from others, but above all from himself. And when his actions collided with the ideal of conduct, the writer decided that his life could not continue. Things like this are best told by Peña, novelist author of “Unhappy” (2019) and “Agnes” (2021), who started the podcast as a way of responding to his community of readers and which has gained traction in Latin America (he is one of the most listened to in the Spotify Books category).

―Speaking of “unhappy” writers, does knowing the lives of these people give you a new perspective when reading them?

The idea is that they read them again knowing their lives. It gives me a double perspective. First, I have always considered myself to be unhappy, my first novel is called “Unhappy”; I thought I was writing largely because I was unhappy. So, as I discover and delve into all the lives of these teachers, it somehow comforts me to know that they too have had moments of great unhappiness, [me hace] not being alone, knowing that in some way the role of the creator is closely linked to a certain unhappiness. Second, now that autofiction is so in vogue, it is true that investigating their lives helps to discover that a large part of his works are closely linked to their lives. No matter how much we invent, we are always translating something from our lives into fiction and I think that is also something very positive.

―I am going to quote your novel, “Unhappy”: “Amara is really smart and she [Karl, la madre] does not celebrate it; on the contrary, it scares him, because she has already experienced it up close and knows that it is the shortest path to pain ”. Are very talented people doomed to suffer? Do they pay the price like Prometheus?

With this I always generate some controversy: There are writers friends of mine who tell me “but I am happy”. I am not saying that it is an absolute, it is possible to be creative and happy, but I do believe that unhappiness is closely linked to creation. Because when someone is fully happy, he does not dedicate himself to counting his miseries in a novel. He just goes out with his friends and enjoys their happiness. I think that writers make parallel worlds because we don’t like the current world very much, we’re not comfortable. This does not mean that you have to be unhappy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Let’s say that in some way we are neurotic or we have those spikes, up and down; I, for example, believe much better or believe much more in my depressive periods than in my happy periods. In a way, writing is talking to myself and doing therapy in a way.

“I always look back on how my life has been and I realize that the more I’ve searched for a goal, the more it has eluded me”

―You are very interested in the subject of chance, do you think that unhappiness is linked to that?

I believe that everything is linked to chance, unhappiness and happiness. I always look back on what my life has been like and I realize that the more I’ve searched for a goal, the more it has eluded me. In “Unhappy” there is a character, the Cancer Girl, based on my best friend who died of cancer at the age of 31. Well, what worse chance than a person so young sick with cancer. My father recently passed away just after the pandemic from pulmonary fibrosis. He could have lived 10 or 15 years more perfectly, I don’t know.

―And also our happiness and unhappiness is linked to other people, because we do not exist in a vacuum. The Sylvia Plath episode stuck in my head, where the author’s story is closely linked to others. A web of mutually influenced events.

I believe that happiness only exists if it is shared, I do not believe that you can have happiness being on a deserted island. I think that the only way to happiness is to be able to relate well with other people, be it your partner, family or friends. And if we analyze all the episodes that we have broadcast so far of “Great Unhappy”, really the great unhappiness comes through bad relationships with the people around them. In the case of Sylvia Plath, there was a mental problem that comes from her family, probably inherited from her relationship with her mother and with the early death of her father, but this problem is triggered when she knows to Ted Hughes. From there, this great tragedy is generated, which is terrible, like a Greek tragedy, which affects generation after generation.

―Javier, it has happened to you that you are investigating the writers and you think “No, this unhappy man is not so unhappy. I better find another one.”

Has passed. Nor do I want to focus it on great unhappiness, in that everyone has to commit suicide in a way like Mishima, theatrical. I think that sometimes looking for the small daily unhappiness also makes us identify more with that author and say, “ah, well, this could have happened to me.” Luckily not all of us like Karen Blixen have had syphilis since she was 30 years old or have to run a farm in Africa that is going fatally. The “Greatly unhappy” has to do with the fact that they are great and that they are unhappy, they do not necessarily have to be the most unhappy in the world. It is true that sometimes I read a biography and notice that it does not give me enough to tell a story. For me, the point of the podcast is not so much that it’s a documentary about his unhappiness, but that it’s a story. I treat it as if it were really fiction, with structure and character development, but with real events.

“Does the unhappy man know that he is unhappy?”

No, and in fact, sometimes I think that one of the problems is that the unhappy person does not know that he is happy. I, for example, who have always characterized myself as very unhappy, was talking about it the other day with a friend: in the end I am going to discover that I really am happier than I think. And I’m going to find out the same on my deathbed, at the end saying “well, I haven’t been so unhappy, in the end I was happy” and that’s something quite tragic, isn’t it? That is very unhappy. I think it’s something that happens a bit to us writers and creators, that we ask for something more from life, that even what for others is something normal and they consider it happy, for us it is anodyne. We ask ourselves too many questions, we ask too much of life. I think sometimes it’s not that we’re so unhappy, but that we don’t realize that we’re just as happy as the rest. I was more unhappy when I was younger, I have learned with age to be less demanding and better accept things as they come to you. I believe that the key to happiness is to accept that you are going to do few things in life and enjoy them.

― Have you considered doing a “Great Unhappy” of someone who is still alive?

I have considered it. What happens is that I like the fact that everything is closed, although it is a bit absurd because investigations could arise that turn everything around. I like to have the idea of ​​something that has already ended, I’m afraid to do it about someone and say something and, imagine, that at 80 years old I end up supporting a fascist party or something like that and you say “My God, I have dropped everything.” this”. I have that fear and, apart from that, you know that this person can listen to it and can refute it and I think that nobody likes to see themselves portrayed, even if it is good. I don’t think Silvia Plath’s daughter heard my episode, but it is possible that Lautaro, Roberto Bolaño’s son, heard it. You always have to keep that in mind to be very respectful, because we are talking about someone’s memory.

“And that no one wants to be the unhappy one in someone else’s life.”

No (laughs). Anyway for me that unhappiness is not negative, people see unhappiness as something negative sometimes. And as a label. We are all unhappy in some way. The other day I was reading a phrase by Gertrude Stein that said that all observed life is unhappy, everything we look at from the outside is unhappy. We don’t know what those people felt. From the outside, existence may seem absurd, the fights, everyone loses people. Obviously, for the program I am going to forget those everyday moments in which you laugh with your children or in which you enjoy dinner with your partner, because they do not have that narrative tension. Hitchcock said that “a good drama is like life, but without the boring parts.” Many times those boring parts are the happy parts. We are left with that unhappiness and I don’t want it to be a morbid unhappiness, but how that unhappiness has influenced the work, in that universal heritage.