Powder | A poignant novel about loss, addiction and homelessness

Many people ask her if it is her story that Sophie Lalonde-Roux tells in her first novel, Powder. If she was inspired by things she experienced to imagine that of Loup-Antoine, who finds himself on the street when his mother throws him out.

But the author has never slept on a bench in Place Émilie-Gamelin. It’s just that her pen rings so true in this heartbreaking story, written in the first person in a raw, and sometimes even brutal, spoken language, that we have the impression that Loup-Antoine is telling us his story himself, sitting on his park bench.

Powderit’s a story that goes straight to the heart. That of a guy in his early twenties who doesn’t really know what he wants to do with his life. And who consumes. A lot, and of everything. When a tragedy makes his cup overflow, he completely goes off the rails. On the brink, he ends up leaving Montreal for the Gaspé, far from everything that hurts him. Because maybe at the “end of Quebec”, he will finally succeed in healing from what makes him suffer so much.

At 27, the woman who decided to pay tribute to her favorite author, Albert Camus, by having a portrait of the Roman emperor Caligula (a character in the play of the same name that changed her life) tattooed on each of her forearms, never thought she would publish anything in her life. And this is true even though she has been writing since she was old enough to hold a pencil – as evidenced by all the loose sheets of paper blackened by her imagination as a little girl and then as a teenager, and which she has carefully preserved.

Inspired by the misery at Émilie-Gamelin Park

Powder was born at the end of her CEGEP journey, where she returned from 2016 to 2018 to study creative writing, after having searched for her path for a long time. “I wrote for myself, but I never really tried to write seriously until I started reading more and getting more serious about my studies. I was at CEGEP du Vieux Montréal and I was always getting off at the Berri-UQAM metro station. I saw them, the homeless, at Émilie-Gamelin Park, and I found it sad. It’s a bit inspired by what I saw every day.”

To these 12 pages – which would never have been what they are without this teacher whom she thanks at the end of the book – Sophie Lalonde-Roux wanted to add scenes over the years, taking “big, big breaks” between writing periods.

Meanwhile, her job in pharmacy brought her into contact with “a lot of different people” who were sometimes going through very difficult situations. It made her think about our relationship with death, grief, loss. It was also there that she discovered that there was a methadone program to help people suffering from opioid addiction. It was there that she saw people coming back to their pharmacist, again and again, for new doses of methadone, trying to hide their shame at having failed to stay “clean.”

“You see it, just with people who try to quit smoking cigarettes, how many times they try, then how many times they drop the patches. And then we’re talking about drugs that are ultra-addictive,” she says, fully aware of the struggle that this represents.

Although she knows that she will continue to write – first and foremost for herself, and not necessarily to be published – Sophie Lalonde-Roux has now found her calling. She is now studying psychology, after considering and then giving up on studying literature. This is where she feels at home, because she likes to think about “what goes on in people’s heads”. What makes some people better equipped to cope with life, while others have to deal with deep existential angst, sink into addiction or end up on the street.

And it was surely the budding psychologist who allowed her to enter Loup-Antoine’s head with so much empathy.

Powder

Sophie Lalonde-Roux

The very moment

120 pages