“I still have plenty of stories to tell”

Emmanuelle Pierrot gets off her bike, ties it to a post and signals me to follow her.

“Do you often come to the wasteland? », she asks me.

I have to admit that this is the first time. We squeeze through a gap between a fence and a factory. On the other side lies a vast rocky area streaked with railway tracks. The place is filled with brush, shipping containers and concrete blocks covered in graffiti.

“It’s really special here for the Hochelaga district. People come to walk their dogs, they get together,” the author of the novel explains to me The version that interests no one under a surprisingly strong May sun.

Black boots, torn fishnet stockings, dark glasses, cap: if the look is punk, Emmanuelle Pierrot’s manners are gentle, almost shy.

I admit that I was very eager to meet her. I have said it again and again to everyone who wants to listen to me and even to others: his novel was my favorite of the year 2023. Set in the Yukon around a band of misfits, the story made me the effect of a punch. It’s raw, brutal, stunningly realistic.

I’m not the only one who was blown away. The day before I met Emmanuelle Pierrot, the novel was awarded the Prix des libraires. A few weeks later, it won Radio-Canada’s national book fight. It also won the Prix littéraire des collégien.ne.s.

So it was Emmanuelle Pierrot, a little overwhelmed by the media attention, who showed me around her vacant lot.

“I get asked all the time if I’m happy. Are you happy with the success of the book? Are you happy to have won a prize? Well yes, I’m happy. I am grateful, for real. But that doesn’t mean that, in my life, I’m happy all the time! It seems like people expect a continual euphoria that I’m not capable of giving them,” she says.

Especially since prices, she says, “that’s not what makes [d’elle] a person of value.”

“Will your girlfriend and your children love you more if you win a prize? she asks me. My dog, he doesn’t care if I win a prize. He just wants me to walk him around and pet him. »

It must be said that, for her, this has been going on for months. Book fairs across Canada and as far as Europe, meetings in schools, offers to write for magazines, interviews in the media.

She insists that she is not complaining. “I have the complete freedom to quit whenever I want, I am never obliged to accept the promotion. And they are smart, journalists! “, she said in a sentence I haven’t heard often.

I am even more grateful that she accepted my invitation.

I especially wanted to talk to him about inspiration. To be frank, I arrived at the interview with a thesis that I had heard and which had also crossed my mind: the one that The version that no one cares about could constitute, to put it a little bluntly, an accident.

The preconception is that Emmanuelle Pierrot would have put her whole life into her first book and that she would have difficulty finding material to write a second one. Her work would therefore be a kind of stroke of genius impossible to reproduce.

This two-cent theory, dear reader, does not hold water. And that’s great news.

The first mistake in this is to think that The version that interests no one tells the author’s misadventures in the Yukon. Yes, Emmanuelle Pierrot lived there. Yes, she was heavily inspired by what she saw there. But Emmanuelle is not Sacha, the novel’s protagonist. Nor is each character based on a real person.

I realize that I took the novel much too literally, a mistake which does not displease the author.

“The goal was to go into reality. It’s realism. If people think it’s true, it’s because it’s successful and the editorial process worked,” she says with a small, satisfied smile.

It is by speaking to Emmanuelle Pierrot that we understand to what extent her novel has been thought out. Her writing comes from an “irrepressible impulse”, the author being able to write up to 12 hours a day when she gets going. But subsequently, this raw material has been questioned, reworked.

The dramatic tension, for example, has been carefully measured so that we don’t really know whether the main character is delirious when he feels rejected or whether there is actually a mass movement against him.

“The first drafts were toned down to keep the reader in this paranoia as long as possible,” she explains.

As for the feminist statement, she didn’t necessarily think about it when writing.

“Political analysis came later, not before.”

Don’t think that Emmanuelle Pierrot wrote this book by chance either. She has been writing since she was 15 and says she couldn’t live any other way.

“Writing came a bit from nihilism,” she continues. It’s a way of knowing what I’m going to do before I die, because nothing makes sense anyway. »

She has always shared her writings at parties or in “underground zines”.

“The ambition to publish is more recent. Now, you are less in nihilism, you are trying to have recognition from institutions. It happened around the age of 26-27,” she says.

Emmanuelle Pierrot is therefore far from worrying about inspiration. She is also working on a manuscript started before The version that no one cares about.

“Making a book is like trying to make a baby, you never know if something will come of it. I hope to be able to make a novel with it, but we’ll see!” she says.

After the madness of promoting The version that no one cares aboutshe is also eager to get back into it seriously. She also says she has a “big sports bag full of travel journals” in which she could draw inspiration – or not.

“That’s my fun in life, telling stories,” she sums up. And I still have plenty to tell. »