«The best thing to leave a boyfriend is that day you wake up beautiful». Thus begins Lists, beautiful, clean (Trojan Horse) by Anna Pacheco (Barcelona, ​​1991), the story of initiation of a working family girl who starts university and falls in love with a «Catalan, Catalan». The new stage will mean leaving almost everything behind: her boyfriend, her best friend, her neighborhood and her roots in search of something new and more sophisticated. « At the beginning of the book she is a complete idiot. Then he retracts little by little, ”explains Pacheco. The protagonist is ashamed of where it comes from. Treat your parents with condescension (correct them by speaking) and live a manual declassification process. A string of disappointments in the form of disastrous relationships adds to the escape from the neighborhood. "She is absolutely complacent, she never wonders about her own pleasure or her sexuality," explains the author.

« Before class pride there is always class shame. I was interested in portraying that moment prior to awareness. She senses a certain machismo in her mother, who has to take care of her grandmother even though they are four brothers, but she doesn't see his. It is the same with compliments. Now we name verbal harassment, but that didn't exist outside feminist circles when I was a teenager. The title of the novel refers to that aspirational mantra of neatness, beauty and demand with which grandmothers and mothers have educated the majority of women in this country, a paradigm "crossed by gender" that Pachecho set out to "crush" in the novel.

It is inevitable to think a little about Last Afternoons with Teresa when reading the love story of Lists, beautiful, clean. Here the two worlds are set up in reverse than in Juan Marsé's novel: she feels like a "failed" party in a bohemian party in which Pulp plays, who has not heard in her life, and when someone He says to put a song, it is blocked because he only comes up with themes of Malu, Dangerous Friendships and El Canto del Loco. « Don't you know I have it? », Asks Pau Milà, the boy she has fallen in love with and the first person she sleeps with whose parents are university students.

Pacheco believes that cultural elitism and class conflict, "the elephant in the room that nobody talks about" , is something permanent, persistent and daily that marks everything: the jobs we have, the houses we live in, friends that we cultivate and "the relationships we have left behind," and that it is not necessary to go to an exotic setting (such as Return to Brideshead or the private school of the Elite series) to portray it. "I have found a much more natural reflection of that conflict in the books of Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante." In her case, that class gap that caused her to leave environments and people behind is " a small trauma , a wound in which I reunite with myself, something that I will never separate anymore."

Another of the illusions that turns into bitter disappointment is the university, seen as a guarantee of social lift and promise of a prosperous life. « The university has been a great disappointment for us and also for our parents , who no longer even understand the professions to which we work because they did not exist before. Precariousness has made even the language change. I studied Journalism and when I explain to my mother that I dedicate myself to collaborations at 80 euros paid in 90 days, she does not understand. They placed so much hope in our studies that I believe that for them, at least, our present is shocking . What they feel for us is compassion.

Ready, beautiful, clean is set in 2011, in the midst of crisis, and is written by an author born in the 90s. In these two coordinates lies a good part of its value, in portraying that generation of which almost everyone speaks without belong to her, the millennial . «We are accused of being conformist, but it is difficult to live in this vital precariousness. People are not aware of what it means to change houses every three years because they raise your rent. I am now 28 years old and despite the publication of the novel I am living one of the most precarious moments of my life. We charge less than when we enter the labor market, we do not improve, there is not even a linearity. Every two or three years we restart everything: work, relationships ... That leads us to forced infantilism.

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