Bernadette, 14, “narrowly escaped death”. On stage, in the middle of Requiem Mozart’s, the young chorister’s heart raced. Her hands became sweaty. Her cheeks flushed. She was convinced: her time had come.
Just like the character in her first young adult novel, author and playwright Fanny Britt once experienced heart palpitations so strong and sudden that she thought death was calling her. She was 17 at the time. “I had a panic attack on stage for the first time in my life. I freaked out!” recalls the writer, who in recent years has written the novels The houses And Make the sugars.
This traumatic episode inspired him to start Hello, my hearta book aimed at ages 13 and up whose main themes are adolescence, self-affirmation, family and, above all, anxiety.
It must be said that the character of Bernadette, who we follow as she begins her very first summer job in a restaurant in Kamouraska, appeared to him during a very anxiety-provoking period marked by an infection whose name we no longer want to pronounce.
The pandemic has really brought out the insecure child in all of us, especially in me, I feel. The idea for the book really came out of that anxiety, particularly health anxiety.
Fanny Britt
She clarifies that this is different from hypochondria. “Hypochondria is when you are convinced that you have a disease without physiological proof of having it. Health anxiety is not necessarily being convinced that you are sick, but it is being afraid of becoming sick and thinking that you have to constantly prevent diseases,” the author summarizes.
For a time, she remained on high alert. Like the heroine of her novel, she mentally scanned her body for any signs of illness. She also worried about the physical and emotional health of those close to her.
The Facets of Anxiety
But, pandemic or not, Fanny Britt describes herself as a big worrier. “That’s me! That’s my lot in life,” she says. In Hello, my heartshe wanted to explore the many facets of anxiety by drawing on her own experiences and those of her loved ones as well – she admits to having “stolen” her son Hippolyte’s summer at the restaurant for the needs of the fiction. “Anxiety takes on different faces in people and it makes them behave in different ways,” she observes.
“I wanted Bernadette to be like I was for a long time, that is to say, she wouldn’t believe it was anxiety. She would say to herself: ‘I have physical symptoms, I have a physical problem!'”
Bernadette’s mother, for her part, has a generalized anxiety disorder. She worries about everything, all the time – or almost. For example, she invents disaster scenarios when her daughter goes out alone on her bike.
Like her heroine’s mother, Fanny Britt has mastered the art of imagining the worst.
I am rarely surprised by trials. […] I live in perpetual expectation that something will go wrong.
Fanny Britt
Over the years—and through therapy sessions—the author has tamed her anxiety, which comes “in waves.” “I think that anxious people spend a lot of time trying to get rid of anxiety, to kill it, to overcome it. What we learn over the years is that that’s not how we cure it. It’s more by accepting all our states,” the writer analyzes.
She continues: “I feel like my anxiety is the flip side of a great attachment to life and to the people I love. […] Since I have had children, my fear of dying is very closely linked to the fear of making my sons suffer this grief. My parents too, because they lost another child. I lost a brother and that is very much at the root of my personality. I was 19 years old. I was already anxious, but it crystallized this idea that the worst is yet to come.
A door to literature
The author, who has written other children’s titles, including Louis among the ghosts And Trufflehad long dreamed of writing a novel for young adults.
“Young adult literature is what opened the door to my love of literature in general. […] “I very quickly became attached to rather realistic novels that depict ordinary life,” she confides, praising the works of Judy Blume.
In closing, what advice would she give to a teenager who has anxiety? “I would tell them to talk to someone about it, not to keep it bottled up, to write it down if they are unable to talk about it or if they don’t have anyone around them. Put words to it to reduce the size of the beast.” […] Afterwards, often, the trick to get us out of our heads is to get into our bodies. This can take all sorts of forms. Singing in a choir, playing basketball, practicing a sport…
Or, like Fanny Britt, to turn her anxiety into a captivating novel.
Hello, my heart
August Horse Editions
From 13 years old