Jorge Fernández Díaz recounted his emotional connection with his father at the Clarín/Ñ cultural space.

“I wanted to go to the Falklands War and at that time my father didn’t say anything to me , but one day he called me to the bar (where he worked) and took me to the private room and prepared a ham and cheese special for me and said: ‘Do you remember that movie we saw where three soldiers come back from the war and one of them comes back without an arm? ’ He couldn’t tell me “I love you, don’t go, stay home,” so he used the cinema diagonally to communicate ,” said writer Jorge Fernández Díaz this afternoon in the public interview with journalist Susana Reinoso at the Clarín / Ñ cultural space at the Book Fair , where he presented his latest novel El secreto de Marcial (Planeta).

Jorge Fernández Díaz is a writer and journalist. For 40 years, he was a police reporter, investigative journalist, political analyst, and editor-in-chief of newspapers and magazines . He is a leading columnist for La Nación and the host of Pensándole bien on Radio Mitre. He contributes regularly to the Spanish newspaper ABC and weekly to the digital literary magazine Zenda , edited by Arturo Pérez Reverte.

His Remil trilogy —the novels The Dagger, The Wound , and The Betrayal —became a true publishing success. The Dagger was a finalist in France for the prestigious Grand Prix de Literature Policière. His works have been translated into French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, and Turkish, and published throughout Latin America. The Secret of Marcial has been awarded the 2025 Nadal Novel Prize.

The first question from cultural journalist Susana Reinoso was about the birth of this new novel, the origins of which can be read in Mamá , a fictionalized book about her mother. “Twenty-three or 24 years ago, I interviewed my mother, who had a very difficult life like many immigrants in Argentina, a thriving middle class that brought a work ethic of effort . Most of these immigrants are now between 80 and 90 years old; they're leaving, leaving only their children and grandchildren. For Mamá , I interviewed my mother for 50 hours and was surprised a lot ,” the writer said.

“I think we know little about our families , only the superficial details. My mother was a matronly woman, and my father was less talkative, more closed off. When my father died, many grieving people we didn't know came to the wake. I often met people who told me things I didn't know about my father, and they asked me to write about him, but I didn't know how because he was no longer with us, and neither were his friends,” Fernández Díaz added.

And it was in my dreams when “ Marcial’s ghost appeared like a pending issue , as if he were looking for me, as if he were a character in search of his author, and then I decided to write about my father.”

The novel unfolds through the films that the narrator and his father, Marcial, watched together on weekends: “ My father and I had a single bond, which was an informal sentimental education that had to do with movies , with super-action Saturdays, the old Hollywood movies from the 40s and 50s. My father was a bartender, my mother a waitress, I watched those movies as a child. We watched Humphrey Bogart, we saw what the palaces were like inside, how those women dressed, what friendship, heroism, betrayal were like. When I discovered that movies and our lives were so intertwined, I knew how to write this book.”

But the writer knew he didn't want a cinephile book but rather an intimate sentimental novel: "I rewatched about 200 films, and in my literature, Hitchcock was as important as Fitzgerald, for example. I watched Gilda with Rita Hayworth when I was 10. Sometimes my dad had to go to work at the bar and the movie was half over, so in the morning I'd go and tell him how it ended, and he'd ask me, 'Who did he end up with, the good girl or the bad girl?' I didn't quite understand the question, but I knew I'd always liked 'bad girls.'"

Cinema taught Fernández Díaz that "we coexist with people who live other lives on other frequencies , and we don't realize it. That's what the movies showed, but also what we saw: from the ages of eight to fifteen, we are like sponges."

“Until what age did you share this with your father?” Susana Reinoso asked. “Until I was 15, because that's when my father discovered I wanted to be a writer and he gave me up for lost . He thought dedicating himself to literature was synonymous with laziness. And I wanted my father to be wrong, so I became a workaholic. I joined the evening La Razón to live my own adventure as a detective . Then I went to Patagonia and spent 10 years working as a crime reporter. For me, the newsroom was a spectacular world , and there I wondered what if I should write a crime novel that tells what we can't tell in the newspaper. And they let me because it was fiction, but it took place there and told the truth.”

“I was very successful. I wrote crime stories and then wrote the episodes. One day the phone rang, and it was my father. Without saying hello, he asked, ‘Will he get the money back?’ And then I remembered that this was how the serialized episode ended, and tears started to flow, which I hid because I was in the newsroom. And I said, ‘Why do you want to know, Dad?’ And he said, ‘Because everyone here at the bar is following him, and they sent me as a commissioner to find out if he’s going to get it back.’ In the end, the literature that had separated us brought us back together, ” Fernández said, to the emotion of everyone present.

Quoting a part of the novel, Susana Reinos read and asked: “The summit is a horizon that is never reached… Is this a bit like what comes from immigration, the idea that suffering is a merit because you come from a place where there was so much suffering?”

“ The sons of those gladiators were forced to be gladiators too . And I think my father used cinema obliquely for that. He couldn't and didn't know how to communicate with his sons directly; he belonged to that generation,” the writer said.

“Did you ever uncover all the mysteries surrounding your father?” Reinoso asked. “I think I arrived late because I couldn't investigate him as a journalist. Freud said there's a consensual narrative; each member of the family has a consensual narrative about their own history. However, Freud says, two siblings can't agree on the same episode . There are unspoken, central things that we all know but don't put into words to reassure ourselves about our own story.”

And one of the last questions was: “ You have become the favorite target of the President of the Nation , how do you feel the reaction of your peers?”

“I've been part of a collective for 45 years, which is like a family: that of journalists. It hurts me a lot when they attack us. I believe that journalism deserves respect in a true democracy ; there are also scoundrels and liars, but mixing the two is shameful. I'm very concerned that they're trying to turn journalism into a cursed profession . In Milei's case, we got off to a bad start because I said I practiced right-wing populism. During the Kirchner administration, I reviewed the entire library of popular nationalism, and when Milei arrived, I began reading about libertarians. It all started because I wasn't going to forgive Milei for what I hadn't forgiven Cristina : I'd rather lose readers than moral authority.”