With Except when I’m an arena, a funny, whirling and tenderly crazy first book, Frédérique Marseille lands a romantic triple axel. Meeting with this climbing center owner at the time of her coming out literary.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
“I absolutely have to tell you what’s going on right now,” said Frédérique Marseille on the line from her home in West Brome. A few days ago, a fence keeping the cows on the farm next door in the right place gave way. “And right now there are literally eight people running after cows in front of my window. ” We laugh. “That’s…funny, huh?” »
The anecdote – indeed comical – would not go wrong Except when I’m an arenathe first novel by the 33-year-old author who arrives in literature after many detours, although she is obviously one of those who believe that there are no real detours, only adventures.
Non-exhaustive biography: Frédérique Marseille has almost completed a baccalaureate in art history, which she abandoned to set up the young shoot Art Bang Bang, was a tourist guide in the United States, co-founded a travel agency and imagined with a friend 1001 Butts, a photographic project cataloging female buttocks of all kinds. With dad, mom and brother, in 2016 she opened the doors of Backbone, a climbing center in Bromont.
But all the while, since childhood, there were the books. “These are my friends, books,” she says. I live with them, they inhabit me. But for many people I write, it comes as a surprise. »
The life that passes through you
Narrated by a young arena owner, this first novel is indeed a surprise, as its heady writing always escapes banality thanks to an astonishing chic for the crazy image, just enough off the ordinary to amaze, but never too much for the spell to break. The improbable associations of ideas with which Jean-Christophe Réhel knitted his What we breathe on Tatouine come to mind.
Incursion into the fluttering thoughts of a desperate woman in whom a parenthesis telescopes into a parenthesis then into another parenthesis, Except when I’m an arena talks about grief by pretending to talk about a club sandwich and about love by pretending to talk about birds.
PHOTO DOMINICK GRAVEL, THE PRESS
The author Frederique Marseille
And without being a personal story, this story borrows heavily from the existence of its author, starting with her life as an entrepreneur and this arena setting: Frédérique Marseille practiced figure skating for 11 years. Choosing to plant his novel there, “it was like watching childhood videos in [sa] head, like a trip in [ses] memories “.
But beyond what is more anecdotal, Frédérique Marseille and her narrator have above all in common the mourning of a friend. Mourning which was transformed in the first into an opportunity to wonder if she was really becoming what she wanted, where she wanted. “Even though his death was an accident,” she recalls, “it was as if my friend had given his life as a gift so that everyone around him could move forward. »
These events are so striking that they make you grow at full speed. It’s crazy, the movement it creates in a life, the loss of someone really close. Even when you don’t want to ask yourself the questions, even if you try to mess around with life, life cries out. It passes through you, whether you like it or not.
Frederique Marseilles
Hygiene of solitude
By leaving Montreal at this time, where she had lived since her majority, to settle in the Eastern Townships, the one who grew up in Saint-Bruno also chose to organize her life around her pressing need for often be alone. “I have a great hygiene of loneliness,” she says, an amusing expression that one could also, up to a certain point, attach to its narrator.
For a long time, I believed that my desire for solitude was something pathetic, that I was a granny. In Montreal, I always felt like I wasn’t doing enough activities. But at a certain point, I decided to assume that my idea of happiness is to read in my bath at five o’clock in the evening. Every evening.
Frederique Marseilles
“If we had more representations of a beautiful and luminous solitude, she adds, it would no doubt be good for those who have it in them, but who don’t dare to offer it, because they think it’s a loser. »
A happy solitary, Frédérique Marseille is not a hermit either, her life as an entrepreneur placing her daily at the heart of the maelstrom of life. The short biographical note accompanying her novel evokes her “megalomania”, a way no doubt a little ironic of saying that she has always been one of those who struggle to wait, who like “that things happen right away”.
Today, she dreams of buying not an arena, but a mountain, in order to install a climbing wall there. “I am one of those people who want to buy mountains, yes,” she repeats, incredulous. His first novel is already something like a small summit.
Except when I’m an arena
Frederique Marseilles
Editions of Your Mother
176 pages