Alice Kellen: “Do men fall in love? Yes, well you might want to read about it one day.”

where everything shines (Planet) is the author’s latest novel alice kellen (Valencia, 1989), which counts its readers in the millions, and queues for its author’s copies in hours. The protagonists of this latest book are Nicki Aldrich and River Jackson, who were born just a few minutes apart. Around them, the author weaves a story that unfolds for almost three decades.

— Sixteenth novel and queues of hours waiting for your signature, did you imagine this ten years ago when you tried to publish your first novel on Amazon and under a pseudonym in case it didn’t work?

— No, but you can never imagine such a thing. You don’t have such high expectations either, or at least I don’t.

— You deleted the first lines you wrote in the song “Where Everything Shines”. Does writing cost more? Do you feel the pressure of that success?

– I notice that. You want to choose each project well, you know that you have to defend it for a long time, you don’t want to disappoint the readers and it’s true that you think a lot more about everything, and a little bit you notice that pressure of a blank page and wanting to do it well.

— This time he decided to show evolution. From the birth of the protagonist until he reached his thirties.

— I was interested in talking about growing up, about how we pass from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood. Also, I wanted to talk about how relationships, the bonds we form in childhood or later, are not set in stone or a straight line. We change and the way we relate to the people around us changes. In this case, Nicki and River, who have known each other since childhood, we see their relationship change.

— It is a romantic novel, but it also deals with other topics, such as abuse, toxic relationships, bullying… Do you also want to open the eyes of someone who reads it and suffers because of that situation?

— You always think that there might be a person who can reach you, who can feel identified. Sometimes we meet in fiction.

— There are a lot of young people in the queues waiting for you to sign the novel. Does it show that they are reading?

—Young people read a lot, but what they want to read. I think it’s great that they have a set reading at school, but it’s legal that when you come home and have free time, just like watching a TV show you like or listening to music you like, you take a book you like to read

— Are you tired of defending the validity of romantic literature and its equality with other genres?

— (Laughter). Little. In the end, romantic literature is defended by the people who read it. There are all kinds of books in bookstores and it is a blessing that there is variety, that readers can choose what they want most at any time, because you don’t always want the same thing; we are nuanced people, sometimes you want to watch an action movie and a romantic one, and it’s all good. A person who has so many prejudices or who asks so many questions seems very sad to me, when I choose a book I don’t think about everything.

“Keep dedicating the book to female readers.” They are the majority.

— It’s about the fact that female readers are the majority in all genres. We read much more than men, according to the indexes. In addition, in all genres, including crime fiction, women go more to fairs, signings, events…; we are more interested in connecting with authors, and even more so in this genre because it is an educational issue. There is a large part of the male gender that directly does not know what a romance novel is, because they have never dared to open the page and start reading one. Maybe one day… men fall in love? Yes, because one day you might want to read something on the subject.

—Did it change the way romantic novels are read?

— Many years ago, readers tried to love the main heroine, and I think that now the tendency of readers is to identify with the protagonist, that is, to sympathize with her and understand her. It was a very sudden change in the last ten years.