A sixteen-year-old boy enters the hospital room where his father lies in a coma, surrounded by machines. He knows he must say goodbye and that it is the last chance to tell him what he never dared to say: who he really is, the fear he always had of him, the shame and the desire. Years later, that impossible conversation becomes Yo era un chico, the long letter in which Fer Rivas finally writes to his father everything he kept silent about during his childhood and adolescence.

The book goes through scenes of his life – school, first friendships, the discovery of desire – and the family history: the Galician grandparents who emigrated to Barcelona in the fifties, the SEAT factory, the flat sick with aluminosis, the social rise and the class shame that crosses generations. In this fabric of memories, the author tries to understand his sexuality, his identity, and the relationship with an authoritarian, absent father marked by his own traumas.

Rivas writes a raw and brave text that names things as they are – love, hate, class, desire, fear – and breaks the chain of a suffocating and inherited masculinity, passed from grandfather to father and from father to son. Yo era un chico is at once a letter to the father, family memory, and a chronicle of how silences and symbolic violence can shape a life, but also of how it is possible to say enough and open a path to another way of being and existing in the world.