Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
” Kitten “. In speaking thus to the young feline with whom I live, I hear Anne Hébert pronounce these words with particular tenderness, I see her flattering her beautiful tabby cat, forbidding him to go out, having had to ask the Parisian firefighters to go pick it from the highest branch of a large plane tree.
It is a privilege to have shared the love of cats with this author whom I revered, whom I imitated when deciding to live in Paris and who showed me so much kindness at each of our meetings. Anne Hébert, by allowing me to approach her light, inspired me with the determination necessary to write and try to live from my pen.
My first thriller appeared 40 years ago. Sixty-some novels later, I know that I would not have succeeded without all these women who guided, encouraged, fascinated, surprised me, without these creators who offered me their vision of the universe, evoking the struggles like wonders, giving voice to princesses as well as to the damned of the earth, inventing vastnesses and mothers who raise their heads, writing loneliness and mutual aid, the fragility of life, the dignity of the humble, the terror of those that have been abused, the enchantment of a class of children and all those passions that pierce us, galvanize us, crush us and transfigure us.
Kim Yaroshevskaya, by endowing Fanfreluche with the power to change the trajectory of tales, taught me about fantasy, the importance of reading a story from all angles and the right to reinvention. The Portuguese bookseller of my childhood who suggested that I discover Athena, Penelope, Zeus, Ulysses, Freya or Isis gave me the keys to the founding myths and Sister Thérèse, librarian at Notre-Dame-de-Bellevue College, nurtured my enthusiasm for Zola and Maupassant, Colette, Hugo, Sand and Flaubert by authorizing me to borrow the books reserved for the “big ones”. The young academic that I was briefly blessed the Canadian Institute where Women’s toilet was waiting for me, very close to the golden book by Doris Lessing and the iconoclast Erica Jong, the essential Second sexthe spellbinding Isabel Allende and Marie-Claire Blais.
Marie-Claire who was the very embodiment of empathy, kindness, generosity and determination to pursue her path, to listen to her voices. Would I have looked at the world the same way if I hadn’t read Thirstyif I had not trembled for Little ashes or the capture ?
And could I have invented Maud Graham if the great Patricia Highsmith hadn’t created so much inspiring uneasiness with her credible criminals, if Ruth Rendell hadn’t demonstrated the harmfulness of exclusion with The illiterate ?
Would I have believed that a city could also become a character if I hadn’t followed Brunetti through the maze of Venice, if I hadn’t surveyed the Grande-Allée with Flora Fontanges, spied on the atypical investigators of Fred Vargas at Paris ?
Would I have understood the word sorority without the infinite delicacy of Louise Dupré, the word immigration without the open-mindedness of Abla Farhoud who painted with such veracity the fragile and chaotic destinies?
What would I know of the uprooting, of the terrible meaning of a totalitarian regime without Agota Kristof? Would I have been able to feed a healthy anger in my novels without the rage of Virginie Despentes, the cries of alarm of Martine Delvaux or the lucidity of Annie Ernaux? Could I measure all the progress made towards emancipation without Louise Desjardins’ acumen? And the richness of the Innu imagination without Josephine Bacon? Would I have seen with the same interest the women who have marked the history of Quebec without Micheline Lachance and her Julie Papineau?
Would I wonder with a new serenity about what I will be and do in a few years without Michèle Plomer’s daring Monique? Without Laure Adler’s essay on old age? Would I have legitimate concern about our national wealth if I had not seen I love Hydro ?
And would I be convinced that no subject is taboo without the extraordinary will of Janette Bertrand to escape darkness, deleterious secrets by denouncing the guilty silences of a certain society?
I owe everything to these writers who were able to tell so many truths, who believed that poetry transforms the world, who explored the intricacies of the human soul both in Saint-Henri and in those distant lands where scarlet servants live which are cruelly topical today, warning us against any slackening of our vigilance…
My gratitude is forever granted to these women who say again and again the immense power of words.
And I smile at the future, thinking that the little girls of today, filled with the Doudou by Claudia Larochelle and fans d’Élise Gravel will not see their future limited by pink or blue codes; they will write boldly, sow magic and give their place to fairness and justice by making us dream of a new society. I hope to be there to read them…