The women she wrote about lived all around her—her mother, for example, was a republican, taught Catalan, and wrote about women’s issues before the dictatorship. I’m also thinking of the writer and activist Maria Aurèlia Capmany, whom she met while in drama school. Capmany was older, she didn’t have a husband—all the things you might have expected if the Second Republic had continued on instead of the Franco dictatorship. Roig learned a great many things from her, and vice versa. I think it’s telling that in Goodbye, Ramona, Mundeta Claret muses about that very idea: ‘She thought about the women in her family and wanted to imagine them living other lives.’

Read the full interview here.