So there was all this time of, literally, gestation. I realized that becoming a mother gave me a completely different perspective on who my mother was. I started understanding the conflict that she had faced, between her womanhood and her motherhood. So that was a huge turning point for me.
And then, days after coming home from the hospital after giving birth to my younger child, with the baby on my lap, I read 10:04, Ben Lerner’s second novel, and I had this epiphany, which was that in fiction—whether you are writing about your own stories or those of others—facts don’t matter. Facts are only relevant when it comes to history. I realized then that I had to distance myself from facts in order to give shape to my mother’s story, to create a coherent narrative. That’s something that Ben Lerner writes and talks about very beautifully, that fiction is the imaginative power to give form to the real, to make sense of the chaotic nature of living.
Because life makes no sense.
Life makes no sense. And the truth is, my mother didn’t know, my father didn’t know, why things happened that way. But fiction has the ability to create logic where there is none, to give coherence and stability to the story in a way that feels very powerful and personal.
And then, when the structure of the novel came to me—its organization in three parts—I knew even before I started writing exactly how it would be laid out. And that’s how I was able to write it.
A poem that the narrator, “Violaine,” writes as a child and addresses to her mother, plays a pivotal role in the narrative. I have to ask—did you really write that poem as a child?
The poem is real, I really wrote it, though I don’t recall the exact circumstances in which I wrote it. I don’t think it happened the way I describe it in the novel.
In discussing the translation, you were the first one to say to me, what do we do with the poem? And I thought, it’s a child’s poem, how do you fake a child’s voice? Well, it was during the first lockdown, I was home with my daughters all day, my elder daughter was eight at the time, so very close to the age I was when I wrote the poem, and she was in a bilingual [French and English] school. So I presented it as a school assignment, to translate the poem. I love how her translation has this incredible innocence, yet also poise, and rhythm. The first thing she told me was that we needed to make it rhyme, because it rhymes in French.
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