I can only write if I don’t realize it. If it’s not writing, if it’s just a desire, to share [avec quelqu’un], to say, to tell someone, in this case, your name. My kingdom for a Gmail. » Annie Du’s unclassifiable first book, “perhaps the first written on a cell phone”, is a centrifugal and centripetal autofiction: it turns on itself, then explodes in sparks of lucidity, in scrolling irony. A text molded by the ways of digital communications: The cookies of the apocalypse, or how I was canceled by the unspeakable.
“I am muzzled,” writes Annie Du. Yet, off the page, my mind is in turmoil, full of bits of words, of feelings accompanied by an image. » Stopped in her desire to become an author after studying English at university. Fascinated by the literary world that attracted her. And which horrifies her, especially after she was attacked by an editor and after the literary #MeToo 2020.
Exploded story of wanting to become a writer, Apocalypse cookiesis free, without a center but made of obsessively funny, dramatic lumps, sometimes both. The sentences make you smile and are strangely evanescent, leaving few impressions but a desire to come back to them.
Annie Du talks about her battle, hilarious to others, against the bedbugs in her apartment. She imagines improbable dictionaries (Dictionary of consanguinity, people who put condiments in their poutine, inclusive writing of those excluded from inclusion and all-inclusive clubs, Dictionary of the dead, etc.). Above all, she writes about wanting to write, being blocked, being afraid of not succeeding, wanting to be an author even before writing, wanting to be read.
“When I was young, around 16, 17 or 18,” she explains in a flow interview where the journalist has difficulty asking her questions, “I looked for hours at the cover of OK Computer by Radiohead. I remember having a sort of vision: I would love that so much, to become a writer who writes a book like a record cover, like this cover.”
During his studies, forgotten. “You know, teachers talk to you about great literature, about creating a work, and it’s like a big brick that stands together, which has a story, an ending and all that. It also blocked my creativity, I think. »
“And then, things have been so bad in my life; honestly, I was so suicidal that I had to come back to life. I had to dive into this freedom of being, into this creativity. »
She didn’t do it alone, not entirely. After hearing the psychologist, author and publisher Nicolas Lévesque on the radio, she called him on a whim to ask his permission to write to him. “It’s a correspondence, really mostly from me to him. He responded to me a little, but it was a lot, it was my space, which he left me. »
“I really have a million emails that I wrote to him,” admits Annie Du, from her cell phone, while lying on her back in bed. “It is me that I wanted to reach deeply, in the depths of my own galaxy, through my Galaxy phone, precisely through listening to Nicolas Lévesque. »
Become a unwriter
After months of correspondence, she realizes that she has “lots of samples in an ocean of things [qu’elle lui a dit]. A kind of chicken broth to make soup. It’s always complicit, almost clandestine, a very flawed story. These are states of mind, deep down, that I look at with a certain distance.”
“I keep discovering levels to my own book, to my intention and to my literary accident, genre,” she says. The story, writes Annie Du, was structured with a highlighter.
There is a critique of the literary world and its power games, of the place of women. “Writing and publishing are political,” she writes. There are punchy sentences, almost advertising. Sometimes funny. Sometimes others: “An author who wants to meet France Théoret will never wonder if she wants to abuse him,” for example.
A moving identity-flow is woven there, changing like Annie Du’s moods, based on a lively creativity and a surrealist imagination, but also on the vocabulary of the shrink. Did she want to do some kind of digital writing? No. But the book was written by email, multiple emails, sometimes sent several times a day. And Annie Du is aware of having a hyperlinked brain, says her editor.
We can see in his writing traces of the work of an “unwriter”, this author who no longer respects the parameters of what defines literature, but explores its margins, places of tension, upheavals, whether media, formal or symbolic. Bertrand Gervais, in his last essay, A fantasy of the end of the book. Literature and screens (PUM), brings back this concept from Kenneth Goldsmith.
“We practice writing that does not seek to be definitive, but provisional,” writes Gervais, “saturated as we are with texts, tweets and messages. We write on the screen, surrounded by texts already written, read or not. We write, capable of copying and pasting what appears on the screen and completes our thoughts, whether they are texts, images or video sequences,” or for Du, newspaper articles.
What comes next for Annie Du? “A by-product, perhaps, of this whole process? I’m thinking a little about what an Amélie Poulain would be without Montmartre, a Montreal version of that, but I don’t even know the purpose of that. I have like a stone path, I have to scatter a little, then I gather. »