Miriam Tirado Presents Adolescence-Focused Book “My Name is Goa” at Fira del Llibre de Palma

It is considered a influencer of parents, for many he is a role model. How do you deal with such success?
— I don’t really like being seen as a model, we are all in the same boat. Sometimes people idealize what they see online, they imagine a movie that does not correspond to reality. In the end, through my books, I try to give a message that we have to change the way we have done things with our children throughout the centuries. It is a very widespread message that represents a paradigm shift, but it is not something that I have invented.

She is a “sustainable breeding” consultant. The motto is “humour, love and common sense”.
— It is that without this I would not have been able to enjoy motherhood. My husband and I are very joking and I think that has given us strength in difficult times. Humor helps to relativize things, because otherwise everything seems very serious and transcendental and can be exhausting. On the other hand, without unconditional love it does not work and, common sense is also important. If you don’t like being yelled at, don’t yell at your children. As they say, common sense is the least common of the senses.

He has triumphed with children’s stories and now he dares with a stage that is surely the one with the worst reputation: adolescence. Why this step?
— There are two highly criticized and despised stages: the age of two and adolescence. I dared to write this book because I have a teenage daughter and a pre-adolescent daughter, so I’m living it myself. I have written it for them, so that they see that what happens to them also happens to others and that it is absolutely normal. I try to make them understand themselves more so they can communicate better.

Why is it so hard for us to understand teenagers?
— One of the problems we have is that, on an emotional level, we are quite late, we do not know how to communicate to others what is happening to us. And that generates many conflicts. The father says “you’re weird” and the daughter doesn’t know how to explain what she feels and answers badly. And so a dynamic of non-understanding is created at home. I have also written it because I remember this period a lot and, in fact, I have based it on diaries that I made at that time. In addition, it is an age in which there are many books, but they are all fantasy, about vampires, but there is little that is realistic. I have never really liked fantasy.

Goan’s parental separation is handled admirably, but does it usually happen that way in reality?
— Probably in most cases it is not like that, but I remember that it was my parents’. And that they were the first to separate from the town. It was a time when everyone who got divorced ended badly. So my experience shows that it is possible and, to make this a different world, we have to have references and the children have to know it. In my books I try to give the references of the world that we want. If we are recreating what we don’t want, we will get hooked on that same way of doing things. There are already plenty of movies and shows about screaming parents or traumatic things happening. I wanted to give another image, that it can be done differently. If parenting has to be conscious, separation too.

Goa goes to Mallorca on vacation, were you also a teenager?
– No way. In fact, I discovered Mallorca when I was 40 years old. Then it is true that I came on vacation three summers in a row. I thought that in Catalonia many tend to go to Menorca, but Mallorca gave me more options. Also, one of the friends from Goa is German and since there are so many here…

This is the first volume of the series dedicated to Goa, what can you advance about this collection?
— The second volume will be out on September 14. It was originally supposed to be released later, but it’s worked so well that we’ve moved it up. Also, this first book ends with the holidays in Majorca, so in the next one we will know what happened and it will be when Goa starts high school.