Born in Ghent in 1977, having left Belgium to settle in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the Dutch-speaking writer, journalist and TV presenter Sarah Meuleman published a first novel in 2015, published in English under the title Find Me Gone. She told the story of a Belgian biographer living in New York who became interested, 18 years after the event, in the mysterious disappearance of her best friend when they were 12 years old.
Less than 10 years later Find Me GoneSarah Meuleman makes a striking entrance into the French-speaking world with Love mea hypnotic dive into the female psyche in the form of a psychological thriller. This first novel published in French, thanks to the good care of the translator Isabelle Rosselin, shares some points in common with Find Me Gone.
Like the girls in the previous novel, Aimée and her sister Margot, 5 years her senior, were inseparable. But on the night of the launch of a novel by their father Saul, a car accident nearly cost them their lives.
That same evening, Daphne, 18, a student and probably the father’s mistress, disappeared without a trace. Was she in the car that Saul was driving?
Based in Amsterdam, Aimée became a famous influencer after a viral video went viral in which she spoke about her father: “Do you know what he does with the women in his life? Exactly what he does with them in his novels: he swallows them up.” While his father is at the heart of a scandal, Aimée tries to see Margot again. An emergency room doctor once promised a brilliant literary career, Margot, who is entering rehab, cannot be reached.
Alternating between the story of Aimée, who likes to quote Virginia Woolf in her Instagram statuses, and that of Margot, who refuses to open up to her therapist, Love me patiently gathers the fragments of memories that the two sisters share. But the age difference between them complicates everything, making the game of mirrors increasingly blurred.
By brilliantly blurring the line between lies and false memories, whether intentional or not, and between interpretation and understanding of events that occurred 15 years earlier, Sarah Meuleman firmly maintains the mystery of Daphne’s disappearance and what Saul’s family really experienced on the night of the launch. So what happened to the mother after the accident?
As she indulges in a rich reflection on forgiveness and redemption, the novelist explores with finesse how personality is constructed, the social masks we approach, the accents we take on. Through Aimée’s journey, obsessed by the number of subscribers that increases from one chapter to the next, Sarah Meuleman firmly anchors her analysis in a breeding ground where the representation of the ego is queen.
Love me
Gallimard
402 pages