One night, while she is travelling, Mikella Nicol is accosted by a man who tells her that she will one day have to “account for her good looks”. Yet it is she who today settles her accounts with beauty in Formattinga third book driven by her disturbing intuition that “violence and beauty define femininity in equal parts”.
A few years ago, following one of those heart-wrenching breakups, Mikella Nicol sinks into a black hole of fitness videos, in order to regain a grip on a life she watched slip between fingers.
But the daily training regimen she puts herself through in front of her computer quickly turns into something more like a sort of self-inflicted punishment. An obsession-prison for a body that can only exist at the cost of deprivation and sacrifice, from which she tries to find a way out in Formatting.
Although very different from his two previous books on a formal level, the autobiographical account digs again, and with dazzling sagacity, the themes that anchored his novels. The blue girls of summer And Aphelia on the side of despair, those of beauty and death.
“Of course, sometimes I listen to myself talk about beauty and it annoys me,” says the author, laughing softly. “It’s as if I was trying to convince myself that it is not possible to reach them, the standards. I’m 31 and I have to tell myself this again. »
Mikella Nicol writes it herself: she has long been ashamed to say that she visits the gym regularly. “I think it’s the shame of giving in to a certain degree of alienation, she explains, especially when you’re in the intellectual, feminist milieu, where you strive to undo these ideas. »
Nelly Arcan, whom Mikella Nicol quotes on a few occasions, has herself often been confronted with what was perceived, strangely, as a contradiction: how could a woman so educated in the oppressive cogs of appearance comply with it with so much stubbornness? “I myself have difficulty reconciling that idea,” says his heiress, “because even if it’s a self-evident contradiction, it’s difficult to accept. »
Disappear to appear
“Beauty is a territory where one flirts with disappearance in order to appear”, writes the author of Formattingone of the most disturbing observations of this book which is part of the same rich hybridity, between auscultation of the intimate, pop cultural analysis and deconstruction of the injunctions that language contains, that Made up by Daphne B. or Again by Marie Darsigny.
Disappear to appear? Tell any woman who’s lost a lot of weight: she’s never been complimented so much in her life. Originally from Sherbrooke, Mikella Nicol, born in 1992, remembers the impact on her imagination of the murder of Julie Boisvenu, which occurred in 2002.
Of course, wanting to lose a lot of weight can’t be equated with being kidnapped, but it’s all about a world that’s dangerous for women and cares little about.
Mikela Nicol
“From the moment you actively pursue an emaciated body,” she observes, recalling in particular the studiously stunted young models of American Apparel, “you impose the disease on yourself and you put yourself in danger”.
False promises
“The discourse of fitness, which promises health and personal accomplishment, presents this training as a preparation for the difficulties of life. But it does not prepare for anything, since it keeps us in a state of dissatisfaction about our appearance,” writes Mikella Nicol, who is sorry that a form of fitness where there is no question of buttock tone or of fat to burn remains marginal.
No matter how insistently a Khloé Kardashian proclaims on her (implausible) show revenge onesie that she wants to help women feel good about themselves and their bodies, it is first and foremost in the hope of arousing the desire that her followers will sweat blood and water, thinks the writer. She sees in this vocabulary of personal growth only a smokescreen.
Wanting so much to specify that fitness is a form of self-care, or that it enables empowerment, the women who produce these videos always end up betraying their true intentions.
Mikela Nicol
A world where “the greatest power of women is to be desirable”, as Mikella Nicol points out, is in short a world where women do not have much power, and where to detoxify themselves from the injunctions that attack remains their own responsibility.
“We are told that we have to take care of ourselves, but who really takes care of women, of what does violence to them? she asks. “We are just starting to talk about feminicides, but who is going to protect women from images that alienate them? We are told: “It doesn’t matter, your appearance, the important thing is that you have confidence in yourself”, but who taught us to have confidence in ourselves? »
Formatting
Mikela Nicol
The August Horse
160 pages