Maruja Torres returns with a book that refuses to look back. She threads Beirut, grief, and political letdown into a raw look at happiness and the failures of those once trusted. Her voice cuts through as sharp as ever.
Maruja Torres does not waste time. She opens with a gut punch: “The first day I cried.” The Zapatero jewels scandal is not just another headline for her. It is a wound. Torres sees the news that José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero received jewels and did not hand them over right away as a deep betrayal. She calls it out. “That he did not deliver the jewels is very serious,” she says. She remembers a warning from a respected figure, now gone: “I want to investigate Zapatero.”
Her new book, Cuanta más gente me jode, más buenos momentos tengo, dodges easy labels. It is not a classic memoir. It is not a travel diary. Instead, Torres stitches together moments from Beirut, Paris, Asturias, and Mallorca. She writes as the world seems to fall apart. The story moves from July 2025 to now. War, political rot, and the shadow of Gaza hang over everything, but Torres refuses to let them poison her pages. She grabs onto small things. A handmade notebook. A stubborn walking stick. A Beirut restaurant that changed owners but kept its soul.
Zapatero first explained in writing that the jewels were a gift from Saudi King Abdullah during a visit to Spain on June 18–19, 2007, a detail confirmed by several leading Spanish media outlets in September 2026.
Her style is the same as ever. Sixty years in, she still mixes tenderness with sharp humor. Nostalgia has no place here. Torres lays out her own way to resist: the more the world lets her down, the more she clings to the scraps that keep her going. She jokes about getting older and her cane. She invents a dry-witted psychoanalyst to spar with about Twitter, Elon Musk, and the mental mess of social media. She looks back on the deaths of friends and her four exits from PRISA.
Disappointment with the left and social democracy runs through every page. Torres does not hide her anger at the state of European politics. She singles out the EU’s handling of the migration crisis and what she sees as a collapse of basic decency. Her criticism is direct. She never slips into self-pity. “I am personally and intimately well, and socially, internationally screwed,” she says. She smiles in a Madrid hotel, cane in hand. She is not backing down.
Social media? Torres has changed course. She has left Twitter behind. Now she prefers Bluesky. She does not hold back on the mental health risks of the digital world. The book’s structure is jagged, almost real-time. It matches the chaos of recent years: bombings in southern Lebanon, Trump’s return to the world stage, and the ache of Beirut—a city she loves and cannot forget.
The discovery in May 2026 of more than 60 pieces of jewelry in Zapatero's Madrid office safe, with an initial valuation of 1.3 million euros, led to a new court-ordered appraisal and sparked debate within the PSOE, where some members found the explanation of a royal gift difficult to accept. The ongoing legal process now centers not only on the origin but also the true value of the jewels, with implications for possible fiscal or customs violations, as reported by El País and Euronews.
Still, this is not a book of complaints. Torres looks ahead. Her humor is sharp. Her resistance is alive. She finds happiness in small, stubborn joys. The world outside grows colder. She refuses to give in to nostalgia or despair. That is what gives her writing its bite. It matters now.
She stands apart from the spectacle-driven stories that fill Spanish headlines. While others chase family feuds and celebrity drama, as seen in recent coverage of public disputes, Torres digs deeper. She cares about trust, principles, and the search for meaning in chaos.
Cuanta más gente me jode, más buenos momentos tengo comes out September 30, 2026. Torres delivers a book that is both a personal reckoning and a clear-eyed critique of the world around her. She will not let disappointment turn to cynicism. That is resilience. At a time when public figures hide behind nostalgia or excuses, Torres faces hard truths—about herself, her generation, and her country. She does not look away. Spanish literature is stronger for it.
