Released in 2014, the novel The Goddess of Fireflies, which gave us the unforgettable character of Catherine, and perhaps one of the finest coming-of-age Quebec films when it was adapted for the cinema by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, was a vision of adult over adolescence. Its sequel, the queen of nothing, coming out on wednesday , would it be like a novel written by a teenager about adult life?
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
After all, the book is dedicated to “the little crisses who have become madams”, and the reverse look is perhaps necessary.
“That’s exactly it, replies Geneviève Pettersen. A lady’s book written by a teenager. »
Because we find in queen of nothing a Catherine in the midst of a crisis, when we come back to her life when, in secret from her husband Fred, she flirts on the internet with Mathieu, a guy she met during her child’s swimming lessons. We also find her implacable and hilarious outspokenness, this tasty orality that Pettersen developed in the first novel, and the ruthless judgment that Catherine exercises on others and on herself.
But the one who thought she was “the queen of everything” at 14 no longer controls anything in her thirties. Even though she is married, a media professional, a mother of two children whom she raises more or less well in her pretty house, according to the standards, she is still this angry young girl who constantly compares herself to others and who a huge need for attention.
I’m sure that queen of nothing will be a great success, because we read it until the end without being able to stop and wonder: “What the hell is she doing? », without it bothering us too much that she crushes in her skid a lot of things that we never really liked. Anyway, where is she going like that?
“In the wall, and she goes there quickly, Geneviève Pettersen throws me laughing. It’s like a train wreck, but not in slow motion. Because she’s stupid too, huh! Me, she scares me! It’s an extraordinary stress relief to write things like that. »
Geneviève Pettersen expresses herself in a way that resembles her character so much that one is tempted to confuse her with Catherine. But if The Goddess of Fireflies was partly inspired by her youth, she points out that queen of nothing is a fiction, inspired by the same theme found in both novels: separation.
She began to write it in full rupture, understanding very quickly that she had to take a step back so as not to transfuse what she was experiencing. But when she pulled out the mothball manuscript two years ago, it only took 20 pages for Catherine’s voice to reappear. “I said to myself: crisse, it’s her, she’s back. Without joke, it was not planned. »
“I think I’m obsessed with this subject of separation”, admits the one who, at 40, has gone through this ordeal and has seen many of her friends go through the same thing in recent years. The writer wanted to capture this moment when everyone is ugly when it happens. “We all go a little bit the same way in there: it’s the worst thing that has happened to you in your life. »
And when there are children, it’s even more heartbreaking, especially when you come like me from a family where there was an absolutely disgusting divorce. Your worst fear is doing that again, and that adds to the stress you’re going through.
Genevieve Pettersen
Suffocating models
Geneviève Pettersen welcomes me to her apartment where her adorable dog Tula, a King Charles Spaniel she calls her sixth child, wisely listens to our conversation. The last time I interviewed her in person was in the house where she lived with Samuel Archibald, father of two of her children (she has three), professor at UQAM who was recently the target of sexual misconduct allegations and who she has been estranged from for some years. We’ll talk about that in private, but she doesn’t blame me for writing harshly on the subject. She is also a columnist, yesterday at Quebecor, today at Noovo, formerly at The Press as Madame Chose, literary character who gave the book Life and death of the couple: from dating to divorce.
Today, she forms a couple with Pierre-Yves McSween, the famous author ofDo you really need it?but they do not live under the same roof, among other things because it suits them well and they have five children together.
That they don’t live together bothers people, which doesn’t surprise me, since for 20 years people have found it strange that my boyfriend and I roomed apart, as if it concerned them. Our models of the couple and the family are so fixed that Geneviève Pettersen believes that they make a lot of people crack up, because they are suffocating. “We have often presented the couple and the family as being the goal in life, the finality, the absolute, but there are ten thousand ways of relating to a person, and that does not make the relationship something something less authentic. This is where I wanted to “varger”, in quotes. I did it, the house, the dog, the kids. I didn’t like that very much. »
“When you have children, it’s easy to make your job, to arrive home at night, pay for dinner and sit in front of Netflix without ever speaking to each other. You’re just being in the same space. With children, it’s worse, because it becomes like a small SME. »
You realize that you are 500,000 km from the other person and you wonder: who is this human being whose panties I am washing after all?
Genevieve Pettersen
queen of nothing is a breathtaking tale of self-sabotage, but under the circumstances, how could it be otherwise? We don’t change, as Céline sings, perhaps because our models also don’t change, and the cruelties of the schoolyard are transposed into the world of work, or into our reality shows. It is only when we get older that we sometimes understand that our parents, who we thought were adults, were as helpless as we are when we reach the age they were when we were children. Also Geneviève Pettersen hopes that queen of nothing be a liberating book, no matter if it bothers us.
“I think Catherine is a person of her time. Everyone is dumb, everyone has biases, it’s tough, this turning point where we change a lot as a society. We change and at the same time, we are so made up of everything we were before and everything we were taught. We are asked to climb ten steps at the same time, but in our minds, we did not climb them right away. We wonder if we’re a bad person, but we’re all a bit the same, even if we don’t want to be that. »
queen of nothing
Genevieve Pettersen
Stanke
224 pages
In bookstores on Wednesday