Almudena Grandes

The articles of a writer are often considered a minor work, that almost residual book that only their fervent readers read. However, these pieces, especially when it comes to opinion columns, can also be read as a kind of ongoing autobiography, a shared diary that is made on the go and without prior outlines. This genre allows for a multitude of registers and themes, from personal anecdotes to political denunciations, it is attentive to current events and demands brevity, qualities that bring it closer to an audience that does not necessarily have to be the same as that of their literary creation.

Having continuity in a newspaper offers another advantage, at least when the author handles it with some skill: the loyalty of the readers. Every week or every fortnight they look for their signature in the pages of the newspaper; a complicity arises, the feeling that the writer not only opines but somehow accompanies, becomes an old friend whom one accepts with their likes and dislikes, their quirks, and their blunders. That is why, when a section ends abruptly—not everyone says goodbye like Fernando Aramburu or Mario Vargas Llosa—the reader feels abandoned; they have lost that friend with whom they had coffee.

Many felt this way after the death of Almudena Grandes on November 27, 2021, at the age of sixty-one. Her collaboration with El País Semanal began in 1999 with a fortnightly frequency; in total, more than two decades, more than enough time to weave that understanding with the readers, who in her case devoured both her books and her columns. Tusquets, her lifelong publisher, now publishes Escalera interior (2025), a comprehensive selection of the articles she wrote between 2005 and 2021, in an edition by the writer Elisa Ferrer (Temporada de avispas, Tusquets Prize 2019), which proposes a thematic organization.

Looks towards the Everyday

The column has the particularity of expressing the author's voice without them camouflaging under the mask of fiction. It is expressed in the first person, signed with their own hand, and, of course, it is inevitable that in so many texts more or less illuminating details of their daily life, their hobbies, or the issues that concern them, which are often an extension of the axes of their literary work, slip in. This is the case of Almudena Grandes: a good part of these articles tell stories of anonymous people, neighborhood heroes and heroines like the survivors of yesteryear about whom she loved to write. In her hands, what seems trivial acquires a transcendence that goes beyond the facts.

And she is always on the side of the people, the ordinary people who fight for their rights and dare to make risky decisions, sometimes like a small story. A Late Vocation, for example, recounts the adventure of a nun who escapes from the convent (with her dose of local color: “at the Soria station she bought a tortilla sandwich that tasted like glory to her”). In She, Until the End she recreates the last moment of happiness of a terminally ill patient, with this closing: “People worthy of love survive death in the memory of those who have loved them.” She always notices the everyday, the simple—a thing, a suit, a gesture, a meal—what happens to us or could happen to all of us.

She is also relatable because she stays attentive to trends: “I suppose that, for some young people, the stellar moment of the holidays was finding a Pokémon in the cathedral,” she wrote in September 2016 (in the column Forty-Two Kilos of Happiness), the year of the Pokémon GO video game phenomenon, to then narrate the most significant memory for her of that summer, far from any digital artifice. Furthermore, she did not hide her most visceral passions, such as her fondness for Atlético de Madrid: “I remembered my parents, with whom I went to the Calderón for the first time, and my grandparents,” she recounts in One Emotion Too Many, about a match that brings her an unexpected gift.

Street-Level Activism

Henry D. Thoreau wrote about the importance of living consistently with the principles one believes in. To be the example, to act more than to preach, without expecting anything in return (if anything, a clear conscience). In this, Almudena Grandes was exemplary: if her novels have a social dimension—both in those that portray the conflicts of the women of her generation, like Atlas of Human Geography (1998), and in those that came to her as a result of the economic crisis, The Kisses on the Bread (2015), and the pandemic, Everything Will Be Better (2022)—and a review of the recent past from the point of view