“To write, you must refuse yourself to others; refuse them your presence, your love. You must disappoint your friends and your children. For me, this discipline is a source of satisfaction, even happiness, and at the same time, the cause of my melancholy,” Slimani says in her book. I don’t agree, or not entirely. I’ve taken this paragraph literally and it’s brought me no happiness or satisfaction, but lots of melancholy. It’s unpleasant, at least to me, to realize that you’re begrudging with your time, even if the business of writing and directing films is one that completely absorbs you. Maybe Leïla Slimani is right that her work and mine require countless hours of isolation, but I deeply miss the contact with other people’s lives, and it’s difficult to go back to how things were, to a time when I was a social creature and led a more communal life, because as you get older, not everything works in your favor, it’s not enough to meet people. Picking up the phone and randomly calling the usual friends isn’t always an incentive. And I think that’s very detrimental, especially for someone like me, who has fed on everything going on around me to write my screenplays—my mother, my childhood, my time with the priests in Catholic school, my years as a young adult in Madrid, the countless friends I hung out with during La Movida, the conversations overheard, the weirdness of some of those friendships, the pain that was caused by intimate personal relationships. If there was one thing I knew for certain when I was young, it was that I’d never be bored. Now I am bored. And that is a kind of defeat.