Was Denise Bombardier a polygraph writer? Or a journalist writer? As essayist Patricia Smart reminds us, writing has always been at the heart of her life. On the books side alone, Denise Bombardier will have authored more than twenty works, ranging from autobiography to essays, from novels to the biography of Celine Dion, scoring a few bestsellers, ending with her memoirs, A life without fear and without regrets (Plon, 2018).
Renowned journalist and “highly publicized character, Denise Bombardier began her literary career by publishing A childhood with holy water (Seuil, 1985)”, as Chantal Savoie contextualized in the review Spiral in the spring of 2002, when the UQAM professor was still studying popular women’s books.
Mme B. writes in this book his romanticized childhood memories. The novel will follow heart tremor (Seuil, 1990), where “Françoise is a fighter. As strong as a man, better than a man, sometimes worse. In business as in love. »
The summary on the back of the book continues: “But in the lonely nights of frozen palaces where international negotiations lead her, fears rise, her ghosts visit her, the mirrors receive strange confidences. A. arrives, a high-risk man. »
so much hate
“Adorned with a powerful” media aura “wherever she goes and whatever she does”, continued Mme Savoie, “his starting position in the race for literary recognition goes against the idea that one would like to enter literature as in a church, signing oneself (with holy water?) and in silence . »
An entry that will have given Mme Bombardier great literary confidence, at least in interviews. “People who don’t have a big ego don’t write a book, that’s for sure,” she relativized in an interview with the Duty in 1999.
“When I write, I let myself be carried away by emotion, by the imagination, and my memory does the rest”, she said then, adding that she enjoyed the freedom given by the novel “to amplify certain characters, to to soften others, to create them from scratch”. “I can’t imagine my life without writing”, she continued around the release oflove me one another (Seuil), “because deep down, I’m a very anxious person”. “I firmly believe that anxiety is the engine of creation,” she added in stride.
Counterpoint of this insurance? Practically every publication of Denise Bombardier will arouse critical hatred, which will interest the researcher Chantal Savoie at the end of 1990. “Why pour out hostility in full pages when many works deemed bad or insignificant simply pass unnoticed? asks the specialist in women’s literary practices, fascinated by this confrontation “which happily surpasses the sum of criticism’s objections to the prose as well as the author”.
Examples ? They abound. Reginald Martel, in The Press in 1990, titled his review of heart tremor “Anyone can write, but not everyone is a writer! “. Jean-Francois Chassay, in Spiralgoes for its part of a “it is not enough to know how to match its verbs to make a literary work”.
Stanley Péan leaves his role as columnist at The Press in June 2002 when the newspaper refused to publish its criticism of Phew! (Albin Michel, 2002), which he will publish in booksellers. “I regret not being able to praise this mediocre “harlequinade” here, especially since a colleague had promised me a case of Veuve Cliquot if by some miracle the book turned out to be the imperishable masterpiece that we are waiting for. all of Mme B.”, he concluded.
Again, to illustrate the continuity of reactions? The French author Éric Chevillard signed a brilliant negative nugget in The world in 2012, on English (Robert Laffont, 2012), where Denise Bombardier recounts her love story and her marriage to a young, educated Englishman. “Literature, it must be understood, has chosen not to get involved,” he writes.
In our pages, Christian Desmeules, for the Quebec love dictionary (Plon, 2014), stressed that the book is not addressed to us, but to the French, and saw in it a “festival of shortcuts and sophism”.
Searching the archives, one easily finds several decades of negative reviews, which never seem to dismantle Denise Bombardier, quite the contrary.
And yet she sells
The main flaw in M’s booksme Bomber? To be bestsellers, at least for the first works, named Mr.me Savoy. A childhood with holy water reportedly sold over 45,000 copies. But the resistance to his work would also target the “relationships between Quebec literature and French literature”, and “the market value of literature in the era of the media society”.
The first publications of Denise Bombardier at Le Seuil, a French house, “as well as the recourse to the sanction of French criticism to counter the attacks of the Quebec literary milieu, as well as the folklorism implicit in the recourse to a French addressee” come up regularly as argument in the Quebec press.
The visibility of the author, who knows how to open the doors of influential French media such as the show Apostrophes, hosted by Bernard Pivot, also visibly annoys and arouses envy. Like the fact that Mme B. manages to make the event. The research she had done for her biography of Celine Dion, The enigmatic Celine Dion (Fixot, 2009) following the star on his tour, had also caused his share of caveats and sneers.
Denise Bombardier “had a lot of courage, because she said what she thought”, mentioned to the Duty Patricia Smart, author of From Marie de l’Incarnation to Nelly Arcan. To say to oneself, to be done by intimate writing (Boreal). “I am thinking in particular of his denunciation of Gabriel Matzneff”, precisely to Apostrophes.
“She was attacked by everyone afterwards. I think it is his articles that are to be remembered, which would be the best of his writings, ”believes Mme Smart.
Chantal Savoie, who did not continue to follow Denise Bombardier’s literary path in the 2000s, made a point of recalling that in Dany Laferrière’s first book, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired (VLB, 1985), the imaginary reception of the novel is described, with reactions from Réginald Martel and Jean-Éthier Blais, as well as an interview with Denise Bombardier on her program Black on white.
Author, Denise Bombardier? Yes. And definitely character, rebellious and controversial, too.