It’s an impossible love story. Toxic. Although consenting. Furiously (desperately?) consenting. With Daddy IssuesElizabeth Lemay signs a debut novel as provocative as it is exasperating, with a strangely bewitching pen.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
The story, however, has everything to irritate. Told a thousand times, too many times, and condemned in advance, to boot. The author, published these days by Boréal, writes it herself, and this, from the very first pages of her novel (yes, a novel, and not an autofiction, it should be specified): “another affair of adultery of such a wearying banality that it surprises so much that it conforms to its cliché”.
Basically: a young woman falls in love with an older married man, you guessed it. Their nights are torrid, but the story inevitably stalls. Such is generally the fate of this kind of asymmetrical relations. Except that here, it has this particularity that it is told by the main interested party. To “I”. And it’s not innocent.
“Often, in novels, this character exists, but he is demonized,” explains Elizabeth Lemay, a graduate in literature, who now works in public relations after a detour through politics. In reaction to Michel Houellebecq or Frédéric Beigbeder, for example, where mistresses are always secondary, even “dehumanized”, she explains that she wanted here and for once to give them “the floor”.
I think it’s interesting to humanize this relationship. […] Because it exists! […] It’s interesting to take an old cliché to hear it: her.
Elizabeth Lemay, author
The heteronormative cliché is, moreover, “voluntarily” exaggerated. Elizabeth Lemay appropriates it, in a way, to breathe a “dose of humanity” into the character. “Not to defend him, just give him a voice. »
And this, in all its nuances, all its complexity, all its paradoxes (and its immobility). Thus, if, at times, her heroine shows lucidity, acknowledging that she is finally (banally) caught up in a “vulgar ass story”, most often she loses herself in “romantic rantings” mixing painful feelings, philosophical reflections and skilful metaphors, to make his story a real poem. Downright.
And it’s infuriating because we get caught up in the game, so nimble is the pen, certainly a bit verbose, but above all colorful, downright poignant. May the first (or the first) who has never loved with a mad love, as irrational as it is impossible, throw the first stone here.
History, a pretext
That being said, it’s not just that. Daddy Issues is also a starting point for talking, yes, about asymmetrical relationships, but above all about literature. A nod to Hubert Aquin, Elizabeth Lemay felt challenged in her studies by this idea of writing “a novel that is not one”, an unfinished story, or rather of exploiting this “inability to write a finished novel,” she summarizes. Admit that the subject lends itself to it. “She tries to move on with her life, but she always comes back to square one. I was inspired by Hubert Aquin, and this idea of the inability to exist as a people. It’s a kind of unfinished novel of her life, she says, and her story is a pretext to talk about who we are. »
The parallel with our collective history is posed from the outset, and returns sporadically in the text.
I come from a people who love their dead language like a mistress loves her lover.
Extract of Daddy Issuesa novel by Elizabeth Lemay
« Of this same painful and violent love that one feels for an evanescent passion or for any other thing that is not ours. True love only exists in fragility. Later: “The defeated peoples and the mistresses love their language and their man with this same dying love, mixed with hope and despair.” »
Because as the story cannot evolve (as we have said, it is condemned in advance), it is through other authors that the action (the reflection) takes place. Aquin, yes, but also Marguerite Duras (obviously), Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux. The text takes at times a very literary turn, school limit, the author quoting the authors directly in the text, by opening the quotation marks abundantly. “As I was writing, I was studying, and I think it shows,” laughs Elizabeth Lemay. His first jet actually dates back to his early twenties, 10 years ago.
Moreover, by re-reading it, she would like today to “shake up” her character a little. “I just want to shake her up and say, ‘Get out of your room! […] That’s not love!” ” Well said.
In bookstores August 23
Daddy Issues
Elizabeth Lemay
boreal
184 pages