At Christmas, I hid a nesting doll in my B’s Christmas stocking, a souvenir from Russia brought back by her grandmother, from the time when we still felt the urge to go and listen to the Red Army Choir at Putin’s. I explained to him that the biggest doll, the shell, was his social self, the one that everyone saw, right down to the little full doll in the center, his real self, his secret garden, the one that shouldn’t be not betray.
He liked the picture. I must have found that in a psych book. I found the metaphor of Russian dolls by reading the novel by Marie-Pierre Duval In the land of quiet despair. This is surely my most impactful reading of 2022, the one that put me in front of this little doll floating on a water table of sadness. Marie, the narrator, asks the shrink: “But how do we find the little doll? »
There are more questions than answers in Marie-Pierre’s book. I met the author one beautiful Friday evening in May in a bar in Saint-Henri, at a time when the thirty-year-olds who have gentrified the area are going to have a Martini Espresso with their Golden Retriever dog at their feet. “I like the universe of questions; it’s freedom. That of the answers is limiting, ”thinks the one her friends call Mapi.
Modernity is an undenounced aggression. And she is guilty of crimes against humanity.
I had never met the 45-year-old researcher/director, a specialist in questions, even though we have been sailing in Quebec media waters for a long time.
After five minutes of discussion, we were bound by the “solidarity of the oppressed” (her words). Already, I had to put down his book sometimes to wipe away a tear; his pen struck me. And I’m not the only one, judging by the comments on my Facebook page. Quiet despair is me, I know that, I received the honorary degree.
When she’s not writing a novel that stings, Marie-Pierre is a formidable, efficient and hypersensitive octopus, mother of a 16-year-old teenager, who wonders if curiosity can be dangerous: “Going to the shrink, it allows to recognize the legitimacy of my questioning. Otherwise, in life, existential questions are never addressed,” she tells me, sipping her glass of white, not too fruity, not too dry.
A shrink had already told me that he was not a philosopher, in response to a question judged without outcome. Sometimes shrinks know how to recognize the limits of soft science. Philosophers have no safeguards.
Social lie and perfection
Marie, diagnosed with a vague “unspecified depressive disorder”, will do her writing therapy after hitting a wall, swallowed up by the ratings race, the taste of the day perfectionism, the emptiness of the overflow , the mental load.
She even gives us a list of her fatigues, including parental, technological and decision-making, because hell is paved with decisions to be made like a toppings counter at Subway.
“How does a rich woman in a rich country come to not want her life? And after having stripped the social veneer of the medium of the TV which sells lies – also called “dream” -, with blows of likesblown egos and hollow gossip, she tackles meritocracy, “porridge for girls”.
She also dwells on her role as a modern mother who dreams of telling her child: go play in traffic, and I don’t want to see you again before it gets dark… Like in the 1970s.
Marie finds herself a “credible model of suffering”—Virginia Woolf and her own room—and a yogi master, Ron Fournier, “free to try live.” Ron is to radio sports commentary what sculptor Armand Vaillancourt is to art in situ : improvisation, bagou and a white mane. Above all, they are not afraid of crashing.
I recognized in Marie all the symptoms of survival mode, in apnea for 20 years, the one in which we dive like single mother freelancer in a time when you have to make people forget that you are a chest of drawers. Make sure it doesn’t show. That ? Anything that doesn’t look like a social promotion and an instagrammable photo.
We then believe that it would be enough for this situation to disappear for the most intense contentment to necessarily take hold. But this is an illusion.
“We are burnt out. Even the most resistant cannot avoid any kind of divorce, addiction, debt, mental illness or sexual anesthesia”, writes the understudy of Marie-Pierre, who sees no happy woman around her, “a happy which bursts the screen. In short, happiness is uneventful. And here, the disappointments are too great not to end up in pharmaceutical prescriptions or a detour through the Cellier space.
Saved by a guy
“How many of us are artists, rebels, revolutionaries hiding in this presentable perfectionism? Mary asks again. And how many of us make ourselves indispensable, our “only job security”?
Getting free is a job for a modern and often educated woman, granted. Even without reading The second sex de Beauvoir, you could do it. But at what cost ? Nelly Arcan spoke of a burqa of flesh; there remains the other, the corset of the mother who cuts a good figure on the benches of arenas on Saturday mornings and who can no longer attend a semi-social event without a make-up artist and a stylist (thanked on social networks, @derien ). Little doll, are you still there?
Marie-Pierre dedicated the book to Alexandre, her boyfriend, who “saved her from drowning”. She envies guys their more casual side. “They are teachers of the present moment, she remarks. The girls are in hypervigilance, in anticipation, because we have learned to be afraid. Afraid of everything. Guys show me how to fuck off. They are more responsive to problems. And they give themselves (or they are granted) more room for error.
“That would be the exchange, helping guys conquer their sensitivity through us,” concludes Marie-Pierre.
A little yin in the yang and yang in the yin. And take care of the little nesting doll.
Recently, my present moment teacher asked me if I liked being a woman. After depositing In the land of quiet despair, I replied, “Yes…but not in a man’s world. »
And this answer, I believe that my mother and my grandmothers could have formulated it too.
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