While many readers are waiting for the last volume of his fantastic trilogy anan, author and journalist Lili Boisvert has instead returned to her first love—literally—with feminist work. At the heart of the short novel Match.we discover Émilie Martin, a woman whose profile is almost a copy-and-paste of that of the woman who now occupies the position of assistant director of information at the newspaper Metro.
Autofiction? It’s hard to see anything else, Émilie being a young writer and journalist who has embarked on various feminist projects, a value that is intrinsic to her. It was then that through this career which took off, Ludwig appeared, thanks to a match on a dating app. Mysterious, vulnerable and charismatic, the one who at first glance had the potential to be the love of a lifetime instead makes him live a hell of a year and a half. Then unfold, gently at first, then in an assumed way, various insults and abusive manipulations.
Little by little, the “strong woman”, whom everyone stubbornly reminds her that she is, begins to lose sight of herself and to forget herself in favor of the one she loves. She even endures problematic and rigid sexuality without flinching in order to avoid yet another tantrum. We also find here the principle of cumshotsubject of Lili’s first book Green wood. This idea of the influence of women remains, although the essay has been replaced in favor of fiction. “He said he felt obliged to respect me, and that it harmed his desire,” says Émilie Martin.
Statements glaringly true like this, which ask the reader to catch their breath for a moment as they are shocking, abound in the work: “And then I had to remember that I did not live in an egalitarian world, and that I stop behaving as if it were. I had to lower my expectations. »
Match. shines a stark light on one of the most mundane and pernicious, yet no less violent, forms a toxic relationship can take. The woman is not always a heroine and the man a murderer. Sometimes it’s blindness, unhealthy talk and the illusion that everything is fine.