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También esto pasará

Overview

Milena Busquets’s También esto pasará, published in Spanish by Anagrama in 2015, is a short contemporary literary novel with a strong autobiographical dimension. Its English title is commonly given as This Too Shall Pass. Rather than presenting itself as a documentary account, the book reshapes intimate experience through a fictional narrator, Blanca. The result is a work in which bereavement, family history, desire, and the routines of adult life are approached in a voice that can be candid, playful, and sharply observant even while it remains marked by grief.

Blanca’s mother has recently died. Returning to a seaside town familiar from her childhood, she spends time with her children, friends, and lovers, while also thinking about her former husband and the relationships that have shaped her life. The narrative moves among these encounters, recollections, and moments of reflection. The mother’s absence is registered not only as an idea but through ordinary sensations and objects: Blanca notices, for example, the remembered smell of her mother in a sweater. Such small details make loss tangible and show how the dead persist in the habits and perceptions of those who remain.

The novel also reaches back to Blanca’s childhood, when her father died. Her mother comforted her with a Chinese parable about an emperor who asks wise people to find a phrase that will hold true in every circumstance. Their answer is “This too shall pass.” Now, after her mother’s death, the saying returns with a changed emotional force. It can acknowledge that grief will alter with time without diminishing the reality of present pain; the same principle applies to happiness and euphoria. The novel begins and ends in a cemetery, giving its account of mourning a circular structure while leaving Blanca’s life in motion.

Themes and background

The book explores how a person continues to live after losing a parent, and how memory preserves a relationship through sensory impressions, stories, and everyday acts. Its treatment of grief is inseparable from its attention to love, friendship, motherhood, sexuality, and the freedoms and obligations of adult life. Blanca’s connections with her children, former husband, friends, and lovers keep the story from becoming a single sustained meditation on death. The shifts between sadness and humor are central to its method: levity is not a denial of mourning, but part of the narrator’s effort to remain present to life.

The work draws on Busquets’s personal history. Her mother was the distinguished writer and publisher Esther Tusquets, who died in 2012. Accounts of the novel describe it as a fictionalized exploration of Busquets’s relationship with her mother, her mother’s death, and life around the age of forty. By giving the story to Blanca, Busquets transforms intimate material into fiction rather than offering a straightforward memoir. The seaside setting, remembered childhood, and close attention to ordinary traces of the mother’s presence help give the novel its personal texture.

Reception and standing

The novel attracted considerable publishing attention around the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair. Contemporary publishing coverage reported twenty-six international rights deals, and the book was quickly translated for publishers in many countries. In early 2015 it reached the Spanish- and Catalan-language bestseller lists. Its international circulation helped establish Busquets as a writer known beyond her home publishing world, and a film adaptation was reported to be in development at the time. The book’s continuing appeal lies in its compact form and its distinctive balance: it treats grief with emotional seriousness, but allows wit, appetite, friendship, and pleasure to remain in view. It is among Busquets’s best-known works and a notable example of contemporary Spanish fiction that turns private loss into an open-ended reflection on how people remember and go on.

About the Author

Milena Busquets

Origins and education

Milena Busquets Tusquets was born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1972. She is a writer, journalist, editor, and translator, and grew up in a prominent literary and publishing family. Her mother, Esther Tusquets, was a distinguished Spanish novelist and publisher. Busquets attended the French lycée in Barcelona and later studied archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, earning a degree in the subject. After her studies she worked in publishing before turning increasingly to literary writing. This background gave her experience of books not only as a writer but also through the practical work of editing and publishing.

Writing and major works

Busquets’s first novel, Hoy he conocido a alguien, appeared in 2008. Her best-known work, También esto pasará, followed in 2015. The novel centers on Blanca, a woman grieving her mother while negotiating family life, friendships, former relationships, and new attachments. It draws on Busquets’s own experience of her relationship with her mother, Esther Tusquets, who died in 2012, but transforms that material into fiction rather than straightforward autobiography. The book attracted remarkable international publishing attention around the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair; contemporary reports counted twenty-six rights deals, and translations followed in numerous markets. It helped bring Busquets to the attention of readers well beyond Spain.

Her subsequent bibliography includes Hombres elegantes y otros artículos (2019), Gema (2021), Las palabras justas (2022), and Ensayo general (2024). Gema returns to themes of loss and memory through a woman in her forties who mourns a childhood friend and reflects on how people remember the same events differently. Taken together, the works show Busquets continuing to explore personal relationships and the ways people make sense of their own histories, across fiction and other forms of writing. Her professional identities as journalist, editor, and translator accompany her literary career.

Reputation

Busquets is known for an intimate, direct narrative voice that can move between grief, humor, sensuality, and clear-eyed observation. Her writing gives weight to experiences often treated as private—motherhood, friendship, desire, bereavement, and the changing meanings of family—without reducing them to a single moral or emotional lesson. También esto pasará remains her most internationally visible book, and its wide rights sales and translations established her as a prominent contemporary Spanish-language writer. Its adaptation was reported to be in development at the time of the international publishing coverage. As of the available biographical information, Busquets is living; no date of death is recorded. Her lasting reputation rests on her ability to shape personal experience into fiction that feels both particular and widely recognizable, and on a body of work that continues to examine memory, intimacy, and the ordinary persistence of life after loss.

StoryFlow

A Daughter Enters Bereavement from "También esto pasará". Blanca moves from the shock of her mother's death toward a more livable, though never final, relationship with absence.

A Daughter Enters Bereavement

Blanca moves from the shock of her mother's death toward a more livable, though never final, relationship with absence.

The Summer as a Refuge from "También esto pasará". Blanca's move to Cadaqués turns a familiar family landscape into a refuge that also forces her to confront what has changed.

The Summer as a Refuge

Blanca's move to Cadaqués turns a familiar family landscape into a refuge that also forces her to confront what has changed.

The Mother's Final Decline from "También esto pasará". The mother's illness transforms a forceful relationship into a painful struggle over lucidity, care, and the limits of rescue.

The Mother's Final Decline

The mother's illness transforms a forceful relationship into a painful struggle over lucidity, care, and the limits of rescue.