Family quarrels come to a head as their mother approaches her 80th birthday. Nothing is forgotten, it all just lurks there.

This is what ‘Lluvia fina’ (Fine Rain) is about, 30 years after his ‘Juegos de la edad tardía’ (Games of Later Years).

Do we all lie?

Yes, it is rash to say everything we think.

Do we lie because we don’t like each other?

We lie to be liked, to look better, to look good in our self-portraits. To build a personality. In front of others, we’re someone else, we put on a show.

Do we lie by accident?

I don’t know. Sometimes we say things without realizing it. Oliver Sacks used to say that hallucinators weren’t lying when they said they’d been kidnapped by aliens. We all have false memories that we have twisted. Lies, as games, as exercises of the imagination, are not lies as such.

Read the whole interview here: EL MUNDO