Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hello, everyone, Welcome back to Connections with Eva Longoria. I'm
Eva Longoria. Today we are exploring our connection to aging. Now,
I gotta admit, in my head, you know, I have
a committee in my head. The jury is still out
on my relationship with aging because sometimes I embrace it,
knowing like it's inevitable, you know, sure, even loving the
idea of aging because I think it equals like wisdom
(00:22):
and growth and maturity. And the next day I'm like,
why do we have another gray hair? Why can't I
run on the treadmill like I used to? So I
think there's a lot to unpack here regarding why does
aging give us so much anxiety? I don't know if
it's the idea of death. Is it that we're running
at a time? Is it the idea of vanity, our looks,
(00:45):
our body? What is it about aging? Because the fact
of the matter is if you're alive, you're aging. So
why all the worry It's gonna happen whether or not
we have anxiety about it. And our relationship with the
aging process, I think not only tells us important things
about how we see ourselves, but also how we see
(01:07):
others and how we see the world, and so I'm
really excited to have this conversation today with the incredible
Isabel She needs no introduction. She's a best selling author,
highest selling Spanish language author in the world, from House
of Spirits and Lana to her new book, Violetta. Her
writing has always explored many different ideas, but one theme
(01:31):
that she has examined beautifully is this idea of aging
and what it means to get older. She's given a
ted talk about it. You've got to check it out.
So I'm very excited and thrilled to welcome Isabelaenda to
the show today to talk with us. Thank you for
joining us so well. Thank you if I thought was
wonderful to talk with you. How are you doing. You
(01:51):
have a new book out, Letta. I want to talk
about that because I feel like it's just another masterpiece
from your head. You write so much, like does it
just pour out of you? Like I can't even write
in my journal. Look, the pandemic has given me time,
silence and solitude write, and I have never been more creative.
(02:12):
I will be eighty years old this year, and I
don't have enough time for all the ideas I have
in my head. I mean it's I'm bubbling inside. Wow,
that's amazing because your life, your career and your life
is so fascinating to me because you're this amazing prolific
author and I think people think you've been doing it
(02:33):
your entire life. But you actually wrote your first book
at forty. Yeah, that's an old age to get started
in this profession. I don't think people know that. And
you've written close to thirty books, So, like, tell me
about that journey. No, I have written only twenty seven. Okay, okay,
it's not third. There's still time, there's still there. But
(02:54):
what was that journey? Like? Like what happened at forty
Because a lot of people at forty would think, like,
all right, you know, life has been determined. I'm in
my career. I can't really start something new, and you
did well. I didn't have anything to hold onto at forty.
I felt that my life was a failure in many ways,
that it was an exercise in mediocrity, that I hadn't
(03:17):
done anything worth telling anybody about. My marriage was collapsing,
it had collapsed before, and I was just holding it
the best I could. My children were teenagers that were
going to college, they were leaving the nest, and I
had a job administering a school, which was not the
best job for me, and I just felt trapped and
(03:40):
getting older and living in exile, missing my previous life
and having no vision of my future life. And that's
when suddenly, out of the blue, I started writing The
House of the Spirits, without knowing that it was a book,
and let alone imagining that it would be successful. So
I lad out. But I think that that crisis at
(04:03):
forty is something that happens to most people, especially women.
M Yeah, I think so too, right. I mean, you know,
people always talk about a male midlife crisis that's a
little later. Probably the man that buys the Ferrari, the
man that divorces and marries the twenty two year old,
like a man aging in society is viewed very differently
than a woman aging, don't you think, Well, we live
(04:25):
in a culture that values only beauty, success, money, and youth,
and as you get away from those values, supposed values,
you become disposable and later you become invisible. And for
women it's harder than for men because everything in the media,
(04:48):
the culture, art, everything sort of accepts the idea of
an old part with a very young chick and the
other way around it seems obscene. You talk a lot
about aging and your writing, and so did you discover
a different relationship with it through your writing? I mean,
did it? Did it? Did you think one way? And
(05:09):
then you go, why am I doing that? Because your characters,
to me, they're just these strong feminist women. Most of
the time. You don't even place the country there. In
some as you don't say the age you just like
you really write them so freely. And so did writing
change your relationship to aging? I don't know. I think
that life life experience losses. I mean, my mother died
(05:34):
at night. She is the model for your Lita, and
she used to say, if you live long enough, you
lose everything. You have come to the world to lose everything,
and if you live long enough, you will experience it.
Your friends, your job, your sometimes your children, God forbid,
and of course your capacities, your abilities, your capacity for
(05:57):
attention and memory and connection and so many other things,
and mobility. Everything From the moment we are born, everything
evolves and changes. And I think that getting older is
part of the change. And I never saw it as
a stage in my life. For example, I come and
(06:20):
you come too. Even from a culture in which we don't,
we never talked about the terrible tools or how terrible
teenagers are. This is a new concept. Before it was
just a journey that you had to travel through, and
you went through these different moments in your life. They
were not separated from the rest. The terrible tools is
(06:41):
not separated from being five years old, and being a
teenager is just part of the process of the hormones
and the body and everything between eleven and twenty two.
So it's just part of the journey. And in my books,
I write a lot about relationships. That's the only thing
that really interest me, relationships between people. And of course
(07:04):
those people are from different stages in life, different moments,
and they age. When I wrote The House of the
Spirits and I finished the book, my son who read it, said, Mom,
you have a character here in page sixty who is
eighteen years old, and in page three hundred he's still
sixteen years old. In your new book, Violetta, the protagonist
(07:26):
lives for a hundred years and she experiences for love affairs.
So what are your thoughts about romance at an older age. Look,
I'm experiencing it even I got married at seventy seven,
and if I live long enough, I would probably marry
a fourth time. Who knows, Who knows. I remember my
(07:50):
mother at nine, she was still willing to have romance,
so who knows. In our culture, the idea that old
people can fall in love and let alone have sex
is just appalling. But that happens at any age. The
only difference between falling in love when I was fifty
or twenty and now is that now I'm very aware
(08:13):
of the passage of time, so there is a sense
of urgency. I don't have any time to waste, and
and Roger feels the same way. So we are very
careful not to waste a day in little petty things,
you know, getting angry about the socks that are in
the stairway or the or whatever. No jealousy, no petty
(08:35):
little fights, No, none of that stuff that's sort of
soils everything in a relationship. If I had known that
when I was younger, maybe I wouldn't have two divorces. Yeah,
I agree. I also think like younger, jealousy takes up
such an amount of energy. I remember being so jealous
(08:56):
and like your stomach is inside out. Oh, it's all, Oh,
it's the worst feeling. Why would anybody want that feeling?
It's so yeah, I agree with you, Like I think
that's why with my second marriage, no weight my third,
and you are way younger than me, so Eva, you
still will have a couple of mores. Don't tell my husband,
(09:18):
but I do think, like like finding love at forty.
I mean I found Pepper when I was forty and
he's you know, he was fifty. I mean we just
it was just like, ah, can we just enjoy this
life together? Like what? Yes? I mean I do yell
at him for the toothbrush or something like that stuff,
but don't don't. But you know who I Also, because
(09:42):
we are aware of the passages of time, we are
also aware of how our bodies deteriorate slowly but surely
and day by day. We don't know this so much,
but when we look back we can see it. We
have been together for four years and we can see
how of things change, and we have to be prepared
to support each other. But let me tell you one
(10:04):
thing that you said about aging that is not true.
It is not true that with aging we get any wiser.
We don't. My idea, we don't. Okay, no, that's my illusion. No, no, no.
With old age, we become more of what we already are.
(10:25):
So if you are a mister, why would you be
generous at an old age? If you are mean, why
would you be nice at an old age? You are
just worse. Nobody can stand you. So I keep telling
people start training now for a wonderful old age, and
that includes not only taking care of your body and
your health, but mostly take care of your relationships, take
(10:46):
care of how you see the world, of how you
are in the world, because that helps so much. And
then when we age, it's not so hard. I always
associate aging with beauty, right, like some people grew beauty
(11:08):
and aging together. And I think you've said it before, like, no,
there's a huge difference. That's not if they're not one
and the same. Beauty in aging or what about beauty
in aging? I don't see that much beauty in aging.
I see some old people who look pretty good, but
but most of them have the resources, you know, unless
(11:33):
they have a wonderful soul. The most beautiful person I
know is nineties. She's called Olga Murray and you can
google her, and she is a woman that is full
of purpose. She's been working for kids in Nepal for
thirty years, saved thousands of kids from from bondage, from trafficking,
(11:57):
from or fanciers. She's extraordinary and so her eyes, her skin,
everything is full of light and and that that is
wonderful to watch. But the standards of beauty that we
have cannot be applied at an old age because it's impossible.
How it would I, at aity, compare myself to a
(12:18):
woman of fifty or or thirty five. It would be crazy.
That would make me so anxious and so unhappy. So
I have to When I look at myself in the
mirror every morning, let me tell you, I get up
very early, very early. I wake up at five by six,
I have taken my coffee and I'm in the shower
and then full makeup. Because no one is going to
(12:43):
see me. I come up the stairs to the attic
and I work all day alone here and maybe the
dogs will take a peek at me, and that's it.
But but I need to look good for myself. So
I have this discipline of taking care of my appearance
as much as I can. I dress up as if
I was going out. I put on makeup, not opera makeup,
(13:08):
but makeup and um, and I have learned what are
the things in my face that I can enhance and
forget about the rest. Don't try to hide what you
cannot hide, just enhanced. I remember when I was working
as a journalist, I was doing some decoration and one
(13:28):
day I had to take pictures in a place that
had a column in the middle of the room and
a pillar, and there was no way that you could
angle the camera so that the pillar wouldn't be in
the middle. And an architect that was there with me
taking the pictures said, when you cannot hide it, enhance it,
and we painted it red. So so that's what I
(13:52):
tried to do. I can't hide the wrinkles, so I
enhanced the eyes. That's so smart. That's a really good
tip for life too. And don't be afraid. Don't be
afraid of red lipstick, of of being vain, because it
helps you if if that's your calling, it is my calling. Actually, yeah,
I agree. I mean I'm Latina too, so I love
(14:14):
flashes and I love lipstick. And I'm like, my husband's like,
where are you going, I'm like to the sala. I'm
going to the living room. Yeah, of course. Well, thinking
about Olga and White is Olga so young? So young?
She doesn't wear a cane, she doesn't wear glasses. I
don't know how she does at ninety six. And I
(14:35):
think that after a certain age, when you have finished
with your children and your grandchildren and your parents, you
should have a purpose, something that takes you out of
bed every morning. A purpose. Don't don't become lazy. Yeah,
that's very important. I find that that's one of the
(14:56):
main things of longevity is having purpose. Wh up and
doing something could be small, could be writing a book,
it could be big. Um, how much of your life
goes into your writing? I think that the author is
in every line in one way or another. Well, I'm
talking about literary fiction, not not a for example, like
(15:18):
crime novels or romance novels. That's different. But in literary fiction,
why do you choose to write about that and nothing else?
With those characters that have to say those things and
nothing else because they're speaking for you. You're writing about
something you care for. In Violetta, I lend Violetta my
love experiences, of course fictionalized that we're not like that.
(15:42):
Exactly at all. And my foundation the loss of my daughter, displacement,
financial losses, everything that I have had, I could lend
it to her. And I also took from my mother's life.
But what, in my opinion, is most interesting in the book,
it's the century. The twentieth century. That was a fascinating
(16:05):
time for the world that I have witnessed. It was
a time of two world wars, of the Cold War,
of the Holocaust, of the declaration of human rights, of feminism,
of workers, revolutions, of so much stuff, and and science
and technological inventions. And look, my stepfather who was born
(16:27):
in nineteen fifteen, there were no telephones in Chile except
five telephones that connected between those five families. That was it.
And he got to see them a man in the
moon and then the Internet. He died at a hundred
and two. So when you see that that century, everything
that happened, it is fascinating. And I love to write
(16:49):
historical novels. Yeah, oh, I love I love your novels.
I love historical fiction. I love how you set it
up against these events that you can use as markers
of you know, what a woman had a face at
that time, what do you think we could look forward
to in aging, like if somebody is not there yet
and you go, just wait, just you wait, there's some
I mean for look forward in a negative way. No positive,
(17:12):
I think positive? I mean is there are negative? Is sure? Sure? Either? Well,
first I have to say the negative and the negative.
With you, I you have way less energy, and therefore
the positive thing is that you use it in a
very wise way, because given that you don't have much,
you have to use it as perfectly as possible. And
(17:35):
that is something that if we learned before in life,
we would live less with less stress. Because one of
the things that I remember of my youth, your age,
for example, was that I was running around like a rat,
I mean like a poisoned rat in elaborrinth, you know,
desperate to do everything, to cope with everything, putting on
(17:57):
myself more stress and more commitments and more responsibilities that
that I was called for. Why why? Why? And then
when you reach an age in which you cannot do
it anymore, you realize you wasted a lot of time,
and now your time is precious, so you use it better,
and that's something good. Then by the time you get older,
(18:18):
you know who you are, what you like and what
you don't like, who you're willing to compromise for, and
what you are not you In that sense, you have
become much more selective and and that makes life easier
and more fun. I would say what I found that
I've done as I've gotten older is made my circle smaller,
(18:41):
right Like I think when we're young, of course, circle
your social circle? Are you waste so much energy on
so many people when you're young, and I think you
learned to curate that as you as you get older.
What are your thoughts about that? Of like you? Right? Well? Also,
going back to the pandemic, the pandemic has made me
(19:03):
very aware of the energy I have and how I'm
going to spend it. And I'm not interested in most
of the people I know, so why would I spend
time with them. I have reduced the circle to a
minimum of great friends, people that give me something intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.
It's the same with the books I read. I don't
(19:24):
read everything anymore, just those books that will be a
pleasure to read. I'm not going to make the effort
of reading something because everybody else is reading it. The
other thing is that people don't expect you to take
care of them when you're older. Yeah, And I can't
tell you even how wonderful that is. I've been taking
(19:46):
care of people all my life. All my life, I mean,
first of course, my family, my my children, my husband,
then a second husband, then my parents for a long time,
for more than twenty years. And suddenly grandchildren are independent,
my parents are gone, and there's this freedom of not
(20:07):
having to take care of anybody. But you have to
live a very long life to reach that point. I
can see how that's super freeing. You're right, super women,
especially for women, where because we are the caregivers. We are,
We are the caregivers all our lives, and we are
trained for that since childhood. We are trained to serve
(20:32):
and help. Um one last question, do you still fantasize
about Antonio Banderas? Of course I will to the rest
of my day. My mother. Look, my mother was nine
eight and had erotic dreams with Antonio Bandea, So why
would I not do the same? Why not? Why? What
(20:53):
about you? Who is your fantasy? Oh, Ricky Martin? Who's
that Ricky Martin living via loca? Okay? Yeah, it's just
the love. Yeah, the love of my life is Ricky Martin.
(21:21):
One last question, what does the book everybody must read?
It doesn't have to be one of yours, but like,
what's the book that you really I don't know. I
don't know because it depends on who you are and
which which moment in your life you are you are I.
You know. People tell me all the time your book
helped me so much, it changed my life. I keep
telling them I didn't do anything. You had the seed inside.
(21:46):
I just put in words what you were feeling, and
by talking about it, by just sharing the story and
talking about it, you come to the understanding of something
that you already in you. I agree. Thank you so
much as Avid for having this conversation with me. Thank
(22:07):
you and Felici that is in the book. I'm so excited.
I mean, anytime writing comes out from your soul, I'm like,
I can't wait to get my hands on it and
read it. Get ask you. Thank you, thank you, thank
you so much for listening. I'm happy to be connected
(22:30):
with you. Connections with Evil Longoria is a production of
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