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

The book traces scenes from her life—school, early friendships, the discovery of desire—and her family history: her Galician grandparents who emigrated to Barcelona in the 1950s, the SEAT factory, the apartment plagued by aluminosis, social climbing, and the class shame that runs through generations. Within this tapestry of memories, the author attempts to understand her sexuality, her identity, and her relationship with an authoritarian, absent father, marked by his own traumas.

Rivas writes a stark and courageous text that names things by their name – love, hate, class, desire, fear – and breaks with the chain of a suffocating and inherited masculinity, which passes from grandfather to father and from father to son. I was a boy It is at once a letter to the father, a family memoir and a chronicle of how silences and symbolic violence can shape a life, but also of how it is possible to say enough is enough and open a path towards another way of being and existing in the world.