Marie-Pier Favreau-Chalifour is a jack-of-all-trades. A graduate of the Saint-Hyacinthe Cégep theater school, she also studied visual arts at Concordia, law at the Université de Montréal and communications at UQAM. Working in the cultural milieu of Montreal, the native of Magog reveals that she had long wanted to become a novelist. Here it is finally answered with the publication of Dear swimming poolbehind closed doors where a woman, Philippa, returns home a few months after the suicide of her husband.
“I have plenty of life samples; my friends say i’ve had nine lives as a cat or been a spy with different identities. I think all of these experiences have nurtured me. I am inspired by real things to create fiction. In the writing of the novel, there is also a work of actress because I created a character which is in “I”. Basically, it’s as if we were constantly with the character’s subtext,” explains the first-time novelist, met at Duty.
taking place in the middle of the night, Dear pool is an introspective and atmospheric novel in which the narrator recalls the toxic relationship she experienced with the man with whom she shared 10 years of her life. Then come to mind the harsh words he had about her, the discomfort she felt when they first met, the events that caused the deterioration of their union. Isolated in this dimly lit house, Philippa feels a presence near her.
“Even if there are few descriptions and we are mainly in the interior, I tried to have a relationship with the body, a feeling of this atmosphere, of this character. I wanted to make Philippa’s monologue seem like a dialogue, that there was a kind of sequence, that it was more active than a simple inner thought. It is a monologue that is directed at someone, more at herself than at her husband. »
Night visit
During this night which did not promise to be so eventful, Philippa will have to deal with the presence of an enigmatic young girl. Soon, she will engage in a series of violent games with the intruder, which echo what she experienced with her husband. Who is this young girl? Is she only real?
“I don’t know who this character is or how I got to this. I had no end point, it was really a sensory exercise. At the start, there was no place, we were in the dark, in the character’s head. Little by little, the house appeared because I wanted to attach it to a materiality. After that, I said to myself that there had to be action, that we shake things up. »
And shaken, Philippa will be repeatedly shaken by this young girl smaller but stronger than her. Billed as a novel about self-reconstruction, Dear swimming pool will be the scene of a series of ordeals, including that of fire and water, which will mark Philippa in her flesh.
“In the last portion, in the confrontation scenes with the young girl, I wanted to explore the relationship to pain versus numbness. It’s as if there were a search for impact to get out of the numbness, like when you freeze instead of fleeing. Reconstruction is a bit of a symbolic gesture for oneself. Even dead, her husband continues to live in her, to have a hold on her. »
dirty night
In addition to water, here a passage to another world, dirt plays a leading role in Dear swimming pool. Hardly arrived, Philippa wants to change clothes, take a shower. Moreover, she notices that everything that belongs to her is covered with dust, as if her in-laws had only done part of the cleaning by taking everything that had belonged to their son.
“Someone who is going through a trauma sometimes feels like they are dirty. To be confronted with this filth brings her back to her vision of herself in relation to her husband, to the one that she thinks her husband has of her, that her family has of her. I wanted to show the effect of the disappearance, but also play a little. It is he who is dead, but it is she who is in dust. »
Throughout the story, Marie-Pier Favreau-Chalifour walks in balance between realism and fantasy, sowing some clues about the presence and nature of the characters she portrays and then blurring them.
“I play a lot with what happens that night; I wanted us to float between two worlds. It was present from the start, but with Miruna Craciunescu, my editor, we tried to make this aspect both more apparent and more subtle. So I worked on the character of the young girl, because it is he who drive the flirtation with the genre, which maintains the tension of the story. That said, I didn’t want to do anything fantastic or supernatural. »
Although she waited years and faced refusals before being able to publish her first novel, Marie-Pier Favreau-Chalifour wasted no time before getting back to writing: “When I believed that Dear swimming pool was over, I felt like writing something else. So I have another novel, which we are starting to publish soon, which should appear next year. I don’t know if this novel grew out of the first one or if it’s just the evolution of my writing, but I’d say there are recurring themes, but it’s not a sequel. The difference between the first and the second is that this time I had something specific that I wanted to bring. »