Valeria, and Writing Under Her Own Name

Near the end of Valeria there is a table at the Madrid Book Fair, and a woman sitting at it, signing her own books in public for the first time. She has wanted this for years. A reader comes up and tells her what the books have done: they changed the reader’s life. The man Valeria lives with is there, a novelist whose own book was to be adapted for the screen, and he scoffs, as if to ask how anything so light could change a life. Soon afterwards, she leaves him.

It is worth pausing on where the series puts its last real decision. Not at a wedding. Not in bed. Not in the rain outside somebody’s door. At a signing table, over a sentence about a book.

The series began at the other end of the same story. A blank document, a deadline, a marriage gone quiet. Valeria had won a literary prize and a contract and could not write the novel she owed, and the flat she shared with her husband had grown so still that neither of them seemed to hear it any more. The first episode was called La impostora: the impostor.

Valeria is often introduced as a Spanish Sex and the City, and the comparison is fair as far as it goes: four women, one of them a writer, a city, a great deal of frank talk about sex. This essay argues that beneath its love triangle the series is about something narrower and more useful. It follows a woman learning to put her own name on things. On her book, which a publisher at one point wanted to sell under a man’s name. On her wanting, which wakes up long before she knows what to do with it. On her leaving, which the series declines to justify with a villain.

Her writer’s block is not a subplot. It is the series’ instrument, and it measures one thing with surprising accuracy: how much of her life, at any given moment, is hers. And when she is about to sign her name away, the people who keep it on the cover are not the men. They are her three friends.

So this is not a verdict on which man she should have chosen. The series spent a great deal of time on that question, and its fans spent more. The more interesting thing is the order in which it all happens at the end. She leaves. She stays in Madrid. She writes. Only then does love come back. The book comes first.

This essay discusses all four seasons, including how the series ends. If you would rather meet Valeria first, it will keep.

María López Castaño’s Valeria is a Spanish series made by Plano a Plano for Netflix from Elísabet Benavent’s novels about the same heroine, the first of which, En los zapatos de Valeria, came out in 2013. It ran to four seasons and thirty episodes: the first on 8 May 2020, the second in August 2021, the third in June 2023, and a shorter fourth, of six episodes, on 14 February 2025. Benavent worked on it as a creative consultant. The first season’s credited writers, López Castaño with Aurora Gracià, Almudena Ocaña and Fernanda Eguiarte, and its two directors, Inma Torrente and Nely Reguera, were all women: a story about a woman whose writing is doubted was, at least at the start, written and directed by women. Diana Gómez plays Valeria; Silma López, Paula Malia and Teresa Riott play her friends Lola, Carmen and Nerea; Maxi Iglesias plays Víctor, and Federico Aguado plays Bruno.

In the first season Valeria, near thirty, cannot write the novel she owes her publisher, and her marriage to Adrián has gone distant and quiet. Through Lola she meets Víctor, charming and elusive, and the attraction wakes her up. By the end of the season she has left Adrián and gone to Valencia, where her family lives, ignoring Víctor’s messages. In the second, short of money, she brings the novel out, it becomes a bestseller, and she keeps going back to Víctor, who offers her an arrangement that promises nothing.

In the third, she ends it when she finds he is seeing other women, and meets Bruno Aguilar, a novelist at her publisher with a young daughter, who says plainly what he feels. After one more night with Víctor, she chooses Bruno at Carmen and Borja’s wedding. In the fourth and last, a year on, her life with Bruno is steady and she is blocked again. He moves into her flat while his book is adapted for the screen, dismisses her novels as unserious and asks her to move to Asturias with him and his daughter, and she agrees. Víctor, changed by therapy, comes back as her friend and tells her that her writing matters. Then comes the book fair, and the reader, and the scoff. She leaves Bruno, stays in Madrid and writes, and only after that do she and Víctor find their way back to each other.

Around her, her friends’ lives run on their own clocks. Lola, an interpreter, keeps returning to an affair with a married man, Sergio, until she leaves for Vienna to put him behind her; turning thirty, she falls for Rai, ten years younger, and in the end chooses him. Carmen, who works in advertising and has had little experience of love, falls for a colleague, Borja, marries him, has a son, Gonzalo, and goes back to her agency before her maternity leave is over while Borja stays at home. Nerea, a lawyer in her parents’ firm who has not told them she is a lesbian, tells them, leaves, builds an events business of her own and falls for Georgina, the photographer she hires; when the series ends, she is still working on Georgina’s fear of commitment.

The first thing the series does that its genre usually does not is let a marriage end without a villain.

Adrián is not written as cruel. The series gives him no great wrong to answer for. The marriage has simply gone distant and quiet, the kind of quiet that settles over a flat when two people have stopped expecting to surprise each other, and the series takes that seriously as a reason. Netflix’s own description, when production began, was of a writer in crisis as much over her novels as over her husband and the emotional distance between them.

What the series gives Valeria instead is someone who pays attention. Víctor, a friend of Lola’s, notices her, and she notices herself being noticed, which after a long quiet can feel like being switched back on. For a while, before the first season is out, she is seeing him while she is still married. The series does not pretend this is nothing. It is a broken agreement, and its weight falls on a man the series never asks us to blame. By the second season the separation has become a divorce, and Adrián learns why his marriage ended in the hardest way available: by reading her novel.

Hold both facts at once, because the series does. Stories about a wife who leaves have long tended to need a villain to license the leaving: a husband who is brutal, or faithless, or at least ridiculous. Without one, the woman who goes becomes the villain herself. Valeria declines the trade. Adrián stays decent, the marriage stays over, and when they part the series lets him agree that they have been walking in different directions. The quiet was the reason. It was reason enough.

An essay in this Library, “The Worst Person in the World and the Crime of Not Knowing Yet”, drew a distinction that fits Valeria here better than any theory of love: not knowing what you want is one thing, and knowing that what is on offer is not it is another. In the first season Valeria knows almost nothing about what she wants. She knows the quiet is not it.

The price is real, and the series pays it in the currency it knows best. The book she finally writes is where the truth about the marriage goes, and the truth reaches Adrián there, in print, rather than from her across a table. A novel can be the first place a woman says a true sentence in her own name. It can also be the least kind place to say it. The series lets it be both.

In stories about writers, the block is usually decoration: a reason for the heroine to stare out of a window. In Valeria it works more like an instrument, and its readings are consistent enough to take seriously.

Look at when the writing stops and when it starts. At the beginning, inside the quiet marriage, it will not come, and her first draft is turned down. It starts to move as her own life starts to move: as she is drawn towards Víctor and away from the quiet, the novel gathers pace, and by the end of the first season she has a draft that impresses her editor because it is made of what is actually happening to her. In the second season, broke and on her own, she brings it out. In the fourth, settled inside the steadiest relationship the series gives her, with a man who says what he feels and makes plans, she is blocked again. After she leaves him and stays in Madrid alone, she writes.

The easy reading is that desire unblocks her. A new man arrives; the pages flow. The series does not bear it out. The book that sells comes out in the season when Víctor is offering her nothing she can build on, and the last book is written after she has left Bruno and before she goes back to Víctor. Men arrive and leave on both sides of the writing. What the block tracks, on this reading, is something else: whether the life she is living is arranged around her own sentences or around somebody else’s shape.

Two episode titles in the second season put it with a directness the series rarely allows itself. The second episode is called Si no sabes qué hacer, escribe: if you don’t know what to do, write. The third is Un libro no es un libro: a book is not a book, or not only one. Those titles are the series’ thesis in the form of instructions. Writing is not what Valeria does once her life is sorted out. It is how she finds out what her life is.

And the wanting belongs to the same faculty. The block and the quiet marriage lift together because they may be, in the end, one condition: a woman who has stopped speaking in the first person, on the page and off it. Desire, when it comes back, is the first sentence in a long time that is unmistakably hers. What she does with it is another matter, and the series does not always approve. But it never treats the wanting itself as the mistake.

The series runs a joke about what kind of writing counts, and it starts early. In the second episode Valeria is at a café with her laptop, telling the waitress that her thriller has become an erotic novel, because she has worked out that sex is what sells. The waitress is delighted and brings up the Fifty Shades books, which her mother adores. Valeria bristles: hers, at least, is literature. The waitress nods towards a woman with blue hair typing at another table. She is a writer too, the waitress says, and she has not sold a thing. Valeria, not unkindly, feels sorry for her.

The woman with blue hair is Elísabet Benavent, who wrote the novels the series is adapted from. When Netflix announced the production, it said her Valeria books had sold some 450,000 copies in Spanish. She had started by putting the first of them on the internet herself, for less than three euros, under the name Beta Coqueta. The joke is on Valeria twice over. She is looking down on exactly the kind of book she is about to write, in front of the woman who wrote her.

Then the joke stops being a joke. At the end of the first season her publisher sets a condition: the novel can come out, but under a man’s name, on the theory, as one account of the episode puts it, that readers will believe a male writer of erotic fiction understands women better than other men do. The novel is called Impostora. A story that began with an episode called La impostora offers its heroine success on condition that she become one.

Netflix’s announcement of the second season described the choice with unusual candour: publish under a pseudonym and at last live from her writing, or refuse, and go on squeezing a living out of an endless run of temporary contracts. It is not a romantic dilemma, and the series does not treat it as one. One recap of the season tells what happens next. Back in Madrid, having lost most of her savings, Valeria decides to sign. Her friends stop her. They talk her into bringing the book out herself, under her own name, and it sells; eventually, the same recap says, her former boss offers to buy the rights without changing the name on the cover.

It is hard not to notice how closely the story tracks the career of the woman at the next table. And it is worth hearing what Benavent said about her genre as the final season arrived: that romantic fiction has been disparaged by critics while its readership has never fallen, and that the label women’s fiction makes her wary, because it puts a prejudice in front of a book that anyone should be able to approach with plain curiosity about whether it holds them. The series stages that argument from the inside. Its heroine begins by drawing a line between literature and the books that sell to women. By the end she is on the other side of it, signing.

When a man’s name was on offer, it was not a lover who kept hers on the cover. It was Lola, Carmen and Nerea.

The series is often summed up as a love triangle with friends attached, and the summary gets the proportions backwards. Netflix, announcing the second season, called the three friends the fundamental pillars of Valeria’s life, and the word is exact. Benavent put it more warmly as the last season came out: the true love story the series tells, she said, is one of sisterhood and friendship, and women have a safety net built by other women’s hands.

Watch what the friendship actually does, because it is not decoration either. It is where the unsayable gets said first, in voice messages as well as at tables. It turns up when a marriage ends and when a book comes out. It argues, and at least once, when Lola’s past comes to light, it cracks. And once, at the decisive moment, it makes a practical intervention in Valeria’s working life that none of the men in the series ever makes. It stops her selling her name.

Each of the three is carrying her own version of the same question, and the series gives them the unglamorous material romances usually skip. Lola has to end things with a married man herself before she can trust a kinder love. Carmen goes back to work before her leave is over while her husband stays home with their son, and the series lets her feel the return as something close to betrayal without mocking the feeling. Nerea comes out to parents who do not take it well, leaves the family firm and builds a business of her own. This is the ordinary work of a woman’s life near thirty, and the friendship is where it gets done.

This Library’s essay on Dolly Alderton’s memoir, “Everything I Know About Love and the Loves That Keep a Life From Becoming Too Narrow”, argued that friendship between women is the love with no plot: no milestones, no ceremony, nothing that counts as an event, so that even its endings go unrecorded. Valeria answers by giving the friendship a plot, and the plot it chooses is telling. Not a ceremony. An intervention: a decision about a contract that changes the name on a book. If friendship is part of the structure that holds a life up, this is what that structure looks like when it works. Invisible, until the moment it holds.

Then the triangle, which is where most of the conversation about Valeria has gone.

In the third season the series builds, with some care, the choice this Library examined in “When Safety and Attraction Point to Different People”. Víctor is the present tense: charm, heat, a man who wants her and does not want a relationship, and who offers an arrangement that promises nothing. Bruno Aguilar is the forecast: a novelist at her own publisher, a father, a man who says plainly what he feels and gives her time to sort out her own. That essay argued that safety and attraction are readings from different instruments, and that the useful question is not which man but what the split is reporting. Of the possibilities it weighed, the one that fits Valeria best is the one it took most seriously: a woman who has never felt safe and wanted by the same person at the same time, and has stopped expecting the two to coincide.

She ends it with Víctor when she finds another woman’s bra on his sofa. It is worth being exact about what broke there. An arrangement that promises nothing is a real arrangement, not a lesser one; plenty of adults make them and keep them. But it protects anyone only if its terms are said out loud, including the terms about who else. Whether the other women broke what the two of them had agreed, or only the hope Valeria had quietly attached to it, depends on words the two of them did or did not say. What the scene leaves is the cost of not knowing.

After one more night with Víctor, she chooses Bruno at Carmen and Borja’s wedding, and the choice divided the series’ audience. In the novels, Valeria chooses Víctor, and many viewers were disappointed; others defended the change as the healthier choice. A Spanish film site’s round-up of the reaction quoted one viewer who saw it more sharply than either camp: Valeria had not stayed with the good one. She did not know how to be alone, and that is not the same thing.

That viewer had seen the shape of the final season the better part of two years before it arrived.

The fourth season puts the forecast to the test, and the forecast turns out to have left out a question.

Bruno is still the man who says what he feels. He is also, it emerges, a man who does not think much of what she writes. He moves into her flat while his own novel is being adapted for the screen. In the account of one detailed review, he calls her current novels airy and empty, the kind of romance everyone is tired of reading, and prefers her earlier, more literary writing. Then he asks her to move to Asturias, with him and his daughter. She says yes. She is blocked again.

Put those together and the pattern is unkind but clear: the contempt for her work and the offer of a shared life arrive in one package. The same shape turns up far from Madrid, in We Made a Beautiful Bouquet. A young man worn down by a sales job hears that the woman he lives with is moving to a lower-paid job she loves, calls it playing, and in the same argument proposes to her: she could quit and do whatever she liked. She says no. Neither man is a monster. Each is offering what he sincerely believes is a gift, a life in which her work is optional. To a woman whose work is part of how she knows who she is, that is not a gift. It is a demotion, with a ring or a removal van attached.

The essay on safety and attraction described safety as a forecast: what will this person do when I am weak, when I am boring, when I am tired and not at my best? Valeria adds the question that forecast had not asked. What will this person do with the thing I make? For a writer, and for anyone whose work is part of her, a partner who is kind to her and dismissive of her work is not safe. He is only comfortable.

Víctor, meanwhile, has been to therapy at his mother’s insistence and comes back as a friend, keeping his distance. When Valeria shows him her old writing, in that same review’s account, he tells her she is confusing seriousness with importance, and that her books matter because they reach people and let them see themselves. It may be the most useful thing anyone says to her in four seasons, and it is not a declaration of love. It is a reading.

Which brings the series back to the table at the book fair.

It matters that the decisive scene is a signing. For four seasons the question has been whose name goes on her work. A man’s, because a man’s name was supposed to sell erotic fiction to women. Her own, because her friends would not let her give it away. Nobody’s, because she could not write. At the fair she writes her name again and again, in books that strangers have bought with that name on the cover, and one of them tells her what the books did. The scoff that follows is not a lovers’ quarrel. It is the old verdict on women’s popular fiction, delivered in public, in front of her readers, by the man she was about to follow to Asturias.

She leaves him. Then she does something the romance genre rarely lets a heroine do at the end: she stays where she is, on her own, and works. Only after the book is written do she and Víctor find their way back to each other. The order is the argument. The series could have sent her from Bruno straight into Víctor’s arms at the fair itself; it does not let them come together until the writing is done.

According to one review of the last season, Benavent herself appears at the fair and tells Valeria that she is a great writer and should not let anyone make her feel small. If so, the woman the first season cast as the writer who never sold anything returns at the end to hand her heroine the sentence she needed. It is a small moment and an exact one. The series begins with Valeria pitying the author of her own story and ends with that author on her side.

Since the third season, the series has carried a question: whether the healthy choice and the wanted one can ever be the same. Here it gives a conditional answer. They can converge, it suggests, but only when the choosing is done by a woman whose work is already hers. Before that, the healthy choice was a man who would have taken her to Asturias, and the wanted one was a man who promised nothing. Afterwards, the same man can be both, because she is no longer asking him to be the thing that holds her up.

Netflix in Japan introduces the series with a line that could stand as its summary: the writing in a slump, love in crisis, three women friends to lean on.

Japanese coverage reached for the same comparison as everyone else’s. A long piece on the drama site Kaigai Drama NAVI set Valeria beside Sex and the City character by character, and added, with a touch of warning, that its many bed scenes might surprise viewers not used to Spanish drama. That frame is worth declining. What is frank in Valeria is not a national temperament. It is a production decision about whose desire gets screen time, taken, in the first season at least, by a team of women making a streaming series for adult viewers. Japanese screens have made the same decision in their own series about marriages that have gone quiet, and the difference between a late-evening network drama and a streaming series is a difference of form, not of temperament.

The closer Japanese mirror is Tokyo Tarareba Musume, the 2017 drama made from Higashimura Akiko’s manga. Its heroine, Rinko, is thirty, a television scriptwriter whose career is stalling; she is taken off a drama she was writing and replaced by a younger writer. Most nights she drinks with her two oldest friends at an izakaya run by one of their fathers, and the three of them talk about what they would have if only things had gone differently. A young model tells them what they are: women who live on if-onlys. And at the end, whatever the men have done, the three promise to watch the Tokyo Olympics together in three years’ time, with or without husbands or boyfriends.

Side by side, the two series share more than a premise. Both follow a woman who writes for a living and is stuck at thirty. Both put the friends at the centre and the men in orbit. And both contain a man who pronounces on what the women’s words are worth. In Tarareba it is a young man telling three women that their talk is the problem, and the drama seems at least half inclined to agree with him. In Valeria it is a man telling a woman that her books are the problem, and the series walks her out of the room. That difference belongs to the two works, one built around the marriage clock and the other around a writer’s block, and not to two countries; neither city comes out the more enlightened. Both series are arguing with the same verdict: that what women say to each other, and what they read, is light.

For a woman who has moved to Japan from somewhere else, one detail may land harder than the triangle. The friendship in Valeria lives in voice messages as well as at tables. Far from home, a small group like that can be most of what holds a life up, and it is kept going across time zones by the same unglamorous acts the series shows: turning up, answering, telling a friend not to sign. The series is about four women in one city. The mechanism travels.

There are at least four ways this essay could be wrong, and two of them are serious.

The first and most serious: the ending the series calls independence is also the romance genre’s oldest wish. The elusive man goes to therapy, grows kind, waits, and is delivered to the heroine once she is ready. The fans who wanted Víctor got him. The third season had been promoted as the last, and a fourth was added afterwards to close the story; whether the reaction to the third season’s ending had anything to do with that, this essay cannot say, but the fourth season returns Valeria to the man the novels chose. A reader who sees the order of events, book first and love second, as a respectable cover for a conventional happy ending is not wrong to see it. The series may simply have found a more dignified road to the same destination.

Second: the test is rigged. Bruno is written to lose. A man who sneers at a reader in public makes the choice easy, and the harder story, a partner who respects her work and whom she still does not want, is one the series never tells. Its argument about work and love is cleanest exactly where it has arranged for the man to be wrong.

Third: Víctor’s change is too convenient to be a model. Therapy works in Valeria on the timetable a final season needs, and an essay that praised the result would be recommending a plot device. People do change, sometimes with help. They rarely do it in six episodes, and it would be unwise to wait for anyone on the strength of this one.

Fourth, and aimed at the series’ favourite thing: writing from life is not innocent. Adrián learns why his marriage ended by reading a novel written by the woman he married. The series treats the book as her liberation, and it is; it is also a public account of a private life, written by one of the two people who lived it, and the other one finds out from the page. A reading that celebrates Valeria writing under her own name has to admit that hers is not the only life on those pages.

And a smaller objection, about the frankness this essay has praised. One Spanish critic found the many sex scenes of the earlier seasons heavy going, and the final season sets most of them aside in favour of what the same critic called real problems. The series’ openness about desire can be read as conviction and also as a selling point. It was probably both.

Here is where this Library stands. A block, in work or in desire, can be information rather than failure; it may be reporting that the life around it has been arranged in someone else’s shape. A partner’s respect for a woman’s work is part of whether she is safe with him, not a separate question of taste. A marriage can end because it has gone quiet, without anyone having to be made a villain, though someone usually pays. And the friends who stop a woman signing her name away are not the background of her story. They are part of what holds it up.

Here is the part that runs against us. This house sells private companionship: bounded, scheduled, paid for. Valeria’s strongest claim is that what holds a woman’s life up is unpaid and long: friends who owe her nothing and turn up anyway, and work that is hers. Nothing sold here can be either. An evening here does not keep anyone’s name on a cover, and it does not write the book. An essay that praises desire lived in the first person is also convenient for a house that sells private companionship, and a reader is entitled to discount it for that.

This is a reading of a television series, not a report about any person. The characters are fictional, and nothing said here about what they feel or need is a statement about the actors who play them or about Elísabet Benavent. Nobody in the series is diagnosed; therapy and the fear of commitment appear only as the series presents them.

The series’ events are described here as Netflix’s announcements, published reviews and recaps describe them; no dialogue is quoted, and where a scene is described, it is paraphrased. Some details of the final season, what Bruno says about her earlier writing, what Víctor says about seriousness and importance, and what Benavent says when she appears at the fair, rest on one detailed review and are reported as that review’s account. The second season’s turn over the contract, in which Valeria decides to sign and her friends talk her out of it, likewise rests on one source, a recap of that season, and is reported as its account. How Nerea’s story ends is not settled here, because the published accounts differ and the series leaves it open.

Benavent’s remarks about romantic fiction and friendship come from an interview with a Spanish news agency as the final season was released; the sales figure is the one Netflix gave when it announced the production. Nothing here claims that the series intended the parallels drawn in this essay, between Valeria’s career and Benavent’s, or between Valeria, Tokyo Tarareba Musume and We Made a Beautiful Bouquet. They are this essay’s own.

Where is your name, and where have you agreed, for good reasons, to use someone else’s? What is your block measuring, at work, or in the part of your life that has gone quiet? Who can stand beside the thing you make, and who would scoff at the reader? Which friend would stop you signing? And if something has ended, or needs to, without anyone having done anything wrong, could you say so without first appointing a villain?

If you are Valeria at the beginning, blocked and quiet and half convinced that the problem is you, the series has one thing to tell you, and it is not about men. The sentences are still there. They are waiting for a life arranged around them. It may take leaving something. It may take friends who will not let you sign. It will almost certainly take writing the first one before you know how the story ends.