[Critique] “Everything I did not to leave my room”, Valérie Roch-Lefebvre

After drawing the portrait of a family stricken by depression in Banished from the Kingdom (2019), Valérie Roch-Lefebvre returns with a short novel in which she describes the painful daily life of a thirty-year-old struggling with a heavy genetic heritage. “At our first appointment, the psychiatrist did not detect bipolarity in me despite my family history. She had woven her web in the shadows, so that it was difficult to bring it to light. Breaking down into brief chapters, which evoke the pages of a journal of cognitive and behavioral therapy, Everything I did to not leave my room oozes despair and the pain of living. With disconcerting lucidity, the author, born in 1987, bears witness to adolescent malaise, strained family relationships, the feeling of alienation that clings to the narrator’s skin in all spheres of her life, as well as the effects the progression of the disease on his body and on his mind. Heart touching.

Everything I did to not leave my room

★★★ 1/2

Valérie Roch-Lefebvre, La Mèche, Montreal, 2022, 128 pages

To see in video


source site-44

Latest