At the beginning, four keyscattered mentiness was to be a novel about loneliness where Élyse A. Héroux portrayed Nathalie, a thirty-year-old with a dark character who decided to cut herself off from the world, and Jocelyne, known as Madame Giffard, a charming octogenarian widow living with her purebred Papillon spaniel, Raimbert Duquette.
“I’ve written another 100 million worthless cases that will never be seen, but in writing for publication, I think that’s the first time I’ve used the technique of the initial situation: an old lady falls to the ground, and the one who looks silly is grabbed with the dog”, explains the author, met at the Duty.
While writing, the novelist felt the urge to develop the characters of the owner of the building, Doris, absent the day Jocelyne let her shopping slip away under the gaze of Nathalie, and Fabienne, who appeared only in the photos in the corridor of the old lady. Then came the idea of a choral novel. Doris has thus become a dashing fifties working as a nurse in a residence for the elderly, and Fabienne, an ex-star dancer who made a career in London in the midst of a midlife crisis.
The result is a novel with a delightful title, Four scattered clementines, which evokes a concentrate of joyfully tangy sunshine, where four women see their lives turned upside down by the hospitalization of one of them. A spring story carried by a female choir that does good, that makes people laugh, where there are no bad guys, except life which brings its share of hassles.
“I know my tendency to write heavy because I am very emotional, hypersensitive. I can get into drama easily, manipulate the reader, draw tears, but I didn’t want to go into that because, in life, I’m a pretty comedic person who likes to make people laugh and do good… without being a mother Teresa like Doris! »
We women
While Four scattered clementines was transformed into a choral novel, the initial theme, loneliness, gave way to that of aging. More particularly that of the taboo of the aging of women. A theme dear to the heart of the author.
“I will be 48 in a few days. I haven’t finished working on this theme because I’m dealing with this. I live a second adolescence: I no longer have children at home, I am single. I arrive in a kind of new twenties where I redefine myself, where I am very happy, but what does culture send back to me? “You’re a little old, you have white hair, you’re a little soft, you’re more relevant, what are these new dreams, these new projects?” In the course of my reflections, I understood that I only had to invent my way of being 40, 45, 50 years old… There are plenty of women who have projects, dreams and passions for more than 60 years old, 70 years old. The living live! »
With this third novel, the author also wanted to offer female characters who, although having to deal with aging, illness, career change, loneliness, are positive models with whom women can identify.
“I know I’m not the only one doing it, because we do it more and more in the works, but despite that, I don’t see myself in the works. THE cast agreed with women, either the mother, or the old whore, or the grandmother, or the divorcee in menopause, or the mother who no longer understands herself when the children leave, can it be that we are tanned? That’s good, all that, motherhood, family, career… but can we stop “casting” ourselves into the roles of grandmother as soon as we’re over 32? »
healthy break
After publishing two novels, The obsolete happiness (Québec Amérique, 2015), portrait of a young woman sinking into depression encamped in the world of publishing, and Mara M. (Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2017), where she recounted her own experience as a young single mother, Élyse A. Héroux, an editor by profession, turned to biography. We owe him in particular Paulina Marois. beyond power (Québec Amérique, 2020), which she wrote in collaboration with Laurent Émond.
“At that time, I no longer wanted to write fiction, I needed a break. I had an intense period as a biographer which brought me a lot. I had this privilege of receiving confidences from people whom I respected and admired. It was wonderful as an adventure and so nourishing. »
It’s a safe bet that it’s thanks to this experience that she developed this gift of creating different credible and distinct voices, each with its own color, breath, syntax, expressions, language tics: “Incarnate my pen with different voices, I already did it because in editing and linguistic revision, you sometimes have to come up with new sentences, adapt to the language of the text in which you are working. It’s clear that writing by making the reader believe that I am such and such, it has refined this ability to be a chameleon feather. And there, with four characters, I was going to spoil myself! »
Returning to fiction, Élyse A. Héroux wanted to mark a break with her previous novels, without denying them, by tackling serious subjects with a lighter approach than before. It’s not for nothing that she quotes an extract from a song by Cabareta musical comedy by Bob Fosse, in which Liza Minnelli shone as a dancer in a seedy club in Berlin in the midst of the rise of Nazism: “ What good is sitting / alone in your room? // Come hear the music play // Life is a cabaret, old chum // come to the cabaret. »
“ Cabaret, it’s heavy metal, and the final scene sucks, but there’s also a lot of joy, beauty and resistance. I think insisting on being happy is an act of resistance. And that’s what I want to do. I have the impression that with this novel, I really found my voice, that I launched into a different way of writing. My relationship to writing has changed. I have really different intentions. I really want to make books that do good and that reading them is a moment of good humor during the day, ”concludes the novelist.