Clémentine Autain is doubly in the spotlight. The 49-year-old politician is regularly invited to defend her LFI party and now Nupes in the context of the elections. First presidential and now for the legislative elections, notably finding her best enemy Rachida Dati on television sets. She is also promoting her new book, Assemblies (Grasset editions), a novel following the love story of three women conquered by a politician. In an interview for the magazine Closer, she confides as rarely, evoking in particular her experience and her childhood marked by the sudden disappearance of her mother.
Figure of politics, Clémentine Autain had however started (very early) a completely different career. Indeed, as a teenager, she had launched herself as a singer in a musical troupe, Abbacadabra, which took up the tunes of the mythical group Abba. She thus walked in the footsteps of her father, the singer Yvan Dautin. What about his mother? The Ile-de-France regional councilor lost her mother, the actress Dominique Laffin, a subject she approaches with sincerity, having written a book about her two years earlier and which bears the name of one of her movies: Tell her that I love her. “She died when I was 12 and I developed a sense of responsibility very early on. I built myself against my maternal model, trying to be a reassuring mother for my children.“
Today, she is the mother of two toddlers whose father is Mikaël Garnier-Lavalley, adviser to the Minister of Sports Valérie Fourneyron, appointed in 2014. The couple is separated, Clémentine Autain is now in a relationship with a teacher from Seine- Saint-Denis, proud of her blended family of four children.
I wanted to be the exact opposite of my mother
If she agrees to talk openly about her mother’s suicide, it was a taboo subject for a long time, as she was built up in reaction to this lost, depressed and alcoholic mother. “This is not a therapeutic bookexplained the deputy in the magazine She. The goal is not to get better, but rather, because I have children who ask me questions, to reweave a relationship between us that I have long refused. For having seen her sink, out of fear of failure, I wanted to be the exact opposite of my mother.“
The women’s weekly reported some of the excesses of Dominique Laffin and the scenes that her daughter suffered like this cover of Playboya shooting made for lack of money. “She is 11 years old and drags her dead drunk mother in a luggage cart around the Gare de Lyon…” In We are not in bed in 2019, she explained that she felt able to understand what her mother passed on to her: “A part of the freedom and of this love of freedom that she had, which was clear even if she didn’t quite know what to do with it. The love of freedom, a certain joy, a certain audacity too, I think that I have really taken my share of it and that I owe it. It’s already enormous to transmit the taste of freedom to your child.“