One of the key questions in the book is what a father is, what it means to be a father.
If you had asked me this question before I wrote this book, I would have answered that a father is someone who is there. However, while writing this book, I’ve realized that biology plays a role. I am my father’s son, first and foremost, because I look a lot like him. Although he died before I was born, his presence was always very much felt through indirect means. In the book, I talk about how important music was to me in this regard: I inherited his records, and by the time I was fifteen, I was listening to the music he listened to, like the Beatles or Pink Floyd. In Bilbao, Aitor came to the book launch; he used to live next door to our summer house. When I was little, my cousins and I would wait at the door for Aitor to come out on his motorcycle and ask him to please take us for a ride. And he always did: he’d let me hop on his bike and we’d go for a spin. The other day in Bilbao, I confessed to Aitor that I had inherited my passion for motorcycles from him. Then Aitor confessed to me that he had inherited that same passion from my father, whose motorcycle he used to ride when he was a kid. I thought this was a really beautiful story, revealing, once again, that who I am is to some extent shaped by who my father was.
From an interview to the author by Anna María Iglesia, The Objective
On New Year’s Eve 1974, Galder Reguera‘s mother found out that she was pregnant with him. That same day, his father died in a car accident. In these pages, an exciting family story full of unexpected turns and the chronicle of an investigation come together: «He is for me the past that I did not have, and for him I am the future that he was denied. He thought of me for a day. The last day of his life. I have always had his shadow in mind.”
Family Book deals with families, the typical and the atypical: what is family? Whom is it made up of? How is it sustained? How does it configure and determine us in all aspects of life?
Through documentation, photographs and interviews with relatives and acquaintances, Galder Reguera reconstructs the personality, life and death of his father, while discovering the strength of his mother, who brought the family forward in some very difficult years. Surprised at everything left behind, the author culminates a search that is also a beautiful exercise in self-knowledge.