"Unhappiness is a driving force of creation," says Javier Peña, creator of the podcast 'Grandes infelices'

For hundreds of thousands of people, the Spanish journalist and writer Javier Peña (A Coruña, 1979) was, above all, a voice. That voice that, on the podcast Grandes infelices , proposes every two weeks: "Imagine a novel with this plot." The novel doesn't exist, or at least it will begin to exist at that moment and during the 45 minutes in which he will compose a narrative that recounts the life and missteps of an author (let's say Horacio Quiroga, Lucía Berlín, JD Salinger, for example) and their work. "I struggle a bit against that criticism of unhappiness," he says now, in Buenos Aires.

Peña has been in Argentina for a few days, where he came to present his book , Invisible Ink (Blackie Books), which from the cover confesses its connection to the podcast . The same colors are there, the lives of authors he knows so well how to narrate. What's different, in any case, is that in the text he opens the doors to his own life. The narrator also becomes, at times, the protagonist, although there's no exhibitionism in the process. There's something else. There's, he says from the first pages, the death of his father .

"The podcast and the book function almost as two pillars of the same project ," he explains in a Palermo café, shortly before presenting the book at the Verne bookstore. "And it all came about at the time of my father's death. After four years of not speaking due to an argument, I went to see him in the hospital where there wasn't much left to do for his health, and instead of talking about what had happened to us, my father tells me stories, he talks to me about the lives of writers . And that's one of my father's particular traits. There are many readers, but there aren't many of those who can tell you about the lives of writers. At the time, that disoriented me, and I think I only understood it when I wrote this book, three years later."

What he understood was that the bond with his father was built on a different material . There may not have been as many hugs, but the nature of that communication had been built on stories. "In the 42 years we shared, my father and I rarely spoke directly about what we felt. What we did was tell each other stories ," he writes in Invisible Ink.

And later, he adds: "In my youth, I thought that stories only provided entertainment in my life; that is, something superfluous. Later, when I became a writer, stories became my way of life; they became functional and necessary. I had to wait until my father's death to realize that they are much more than that. They are the torrent that shapes my ideas, the essence of who I am . It wasn't that my father and I related to stories: stories were our relationship."

So those lives (dozens and dozens of biographies read and analyzed) became the protagonists of the book, but also of the podcast. " This project of examining the lives of writers helps me a lot because comparing their existences with mine somehow offers me solace. After all, they had the same traumas as me and did what they could to overcome them ," she shares.

Another aspect that interested him about these life journeys was a clear common denominator: the unhappiness of their protagonists . "I'm sure that special sensitivity is reflected in the work they wrote. I think it's a driving force behind their creation ," he confirms.

He says he doesn't want to know how many viewers the podcast has, but some data thrown around here and there suggests 300,000 people, half of them on this side of the Atlantic . The number surprises him, even when he shares it with modesty. It has nothing to do with what he initially imagined. "I knew I wanted to do a podcast to keep in touch with my readers between books, which come out every three years or so," he recalls.

By then, Peña had combined his work as a journalist and communicator with the publication of Infelices , his first novel, a work about failure and the tyranny of expectations that Blackie Books published in 2019. It was read by 12,000 people. Not bad for a debut. Then, he published Agnes , his second work of fiction. Between that book and Tinta invisible , the first episode of his series, dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut , appeared on March 17, 2022. There would be another 24 and the new season is already in the works .

But before that, in the hospital room where his father, after four years of silence, wanted to know what book he was reading, a journey of knowledge and self-knowledge began that would bounce between the death of Fernando Peña and the episode dedicated to Vonnegut. "During that process, the first six or seven months, I read a lot of biographies and realized that there are many commonalities among all writers , even if they are from different centuries and different parts of the world."

These coincidences are the pillars that structure the chapters of Invisible Ink : ego, envy, the importance of luck, suffering, imagination... With these ideas in mind, he began to write. But things went a bit awry: "I start writing and my father appears , and that farewell from the hospital appears, and that's when I realize that my father has to be the backbone of the book."

That discovery, mentioned in the interview without further detail, is reconstructed in the book in a breathtaking narrative that moves even the most distant reader . From the shock of a man who, facing the Costa da Morte, cannot stop crying, a book and a podcast are born that put a spotlight on sadness and suffering . There is no idea less "Instagrammable" and out of place for a present that demands happiness constantly, without pause.

" The tyranny of happiness interested me a lot because I'm very unhappy ," he says, looking into my eyes. "I'm a person who suffers a lot, who tortures myself, who punishes myself, who has a neurosis. And there really aren't any elements in my life that justify it. Fortunately, there are unhappinesses that come from illness or war, and I don't have any of that. In fact, I dedicate myself to what I love, I don't have financial problems, I don't have health problems, I don't have relationship problems. And yet, I'm tremendously unhappy. So, I was interested in looking at the authors I admire, knowing how they dealt with that, and, in a way, I also liked seeing that we had a brotherhood of unhappiness."

For Javier Peña, something is born from that pain: a creative energy, a need. That's why, when he's questioned about the title, Grandes infelices (Great Unhappy Ones ), having a derogatory tinge, he takes the plunge and says: " But what's the problem with them being unhappy ? If of the 24 authors on whom I have monographs, eight have committed suicide, do you think they weren't unhappy? For me, that's not pejorative at all. No. For me, it's the other way around; you have to love him more because look how he suffered and yet he was still able to create ."

The tyranny of happiness overwhelms him. His tone even reveals that it angers him: "I don't know how you experience it, but I see increasing unhappiness in the people I know . We have everything, more than ever, and yet, I see brutal mental health and psychological problems. So, why the hell do we have to pretend we're happy? Because society demands it of us? Well, maybe that's one of the problems we have: we're expected to live like we're on Instagram all day. But Instagram is the biggest lie there is. People are constantly posting photos of trips they're having a terrible time on; or of their nights out, and the truth is, they didn't have a very good time. This idea on social media that we have to sell ourselves as the best we can be—I think it's slavery and it exacerbates problems and unhappiness."

In one breath, almost without breathing. Almost an apology for the right to not be well. "Why not admit it? Since I accepted that I'm unhappy and that I'll always be, I'm calmer, " he concludes.

Grandes infelices has a new special program dedicated to writers and their cities : Sappho's Archaic Greece; Dante's Late Middle Ages; Marco Polo's Mongol Empire; and Heinrich Schliemann's Homeric Troy. In the closing minutes, Javier Peña promises a series dedicated entirely to this topic, beginning in September.

And he anticipates that there will be an Argentine on the list of protagonists: Jorge Luis Borges and the city of Buenos Aires . "There will also be Kafka and Prague; Dostoevsky and St. Petersburg. And there are two female authors," he anticipates. But to discover them, as at the end of each episode, you'll have to guess a little and wait a little.

Invisible Ink , by Javier Peña (Blackie Books)