What made you want to write this novel about these two sisters who haven’t spoken to each other for five years and who reunite in their grandmother’s house, where they spent their best summers?
I happen to have a little sister whom I love very much, who is my best friend, and this relationship has always fascinated me. The relationship between brothers and sisters is something so special, that we don’t choose and which can make us unhappy as it can make us happy, but which positions us for life. I have always been the big sister, even today. And I always grew up with this fear of losing my sister because when I was in college, there was a friend who read me the lines of the hand and who showed me the line of life, the line heart, all that. When I got home – my sister was little, she must have been 7 or 8 years old – I said to her: show me, I’ll read your palms. His lifeline was super short, it terrified me! I grew up thinking that my sister is going to die very young, that I’m going to lose her even though she’s so important in my life.
You dedicate this novel to your sister. Does your relationship resemble that between Emma and Agathe which, despite their estrangement, is made up of complicity, camaraderie and benevolence?
Yes and no. There are a few of us, many memories that belong to us and others that don’t belong to us at all. I don’t necessarily look like Emma, who is rather psychorigid and serious; I no longer have Agathe’s freedom and humor. There are temperaments that resemble us, so there are some of us, but that’s a fiction. That’s how I work: my novels are fictions in which I slip from reality.
At the start of their reunion, Agathe says she is convinced that you can love someone and not support them. Is it always possible to find each other when we share childhood memories, but we have opposite lives and temperaments?
I think it binds irremediably. When we share the same childhood and, what is more, the same parents, the same family, there is necessarily a link. But I know many brothers and sisters around me who no longer speak to each other and who, certainly, are too different to speak to each other again and get along one day. So I’m not sure it can make us overcome all the differences and misunderstandings. What I am sure of, on the other hand, is that when you have a nostalgic temperament, when you are very anchored in childhood, as is my case, there is always this link, these memories which can erase the rest. It happened to us, with my sister, to have disagreements, to distance ourselves at certain times, to no longer understand each other, to no longer speak to each other; and it will happen to us again, no doubt. Our father’s illness has brought us much closer. So I think it creates a common base, a link, and that’s what I wanted to explore in my novel. This link will always exist, whether we like it or not. But we are not obliged to support our family under the pretext that it is our family, to live with our brothers and sisters if we do not get along with them and if we are irreconcilable. In any case, it is not a lesson that I wanted to give or a moral. I wanted to tell this story, but it is in no way an example to follow or a universal path.
While talking with her sister, Emma comes to the conclusion that she has a good life, after all. Do we sometimes tend to look too far for the definition of a good life?
I have a very anxious, very dark part, and it would be very practical to be able to learn from each ordeal that we go through. But it’s true that, sometimes, when we live through hardships, we realize that in fact, we are very lucky and that the good life, we can have it every day, that we are not have to have better. I realized this about ten years ago. I always said to myself: “when I will be thinner, when I will be richer…” We always postpone happiness, finally. I don’t know what it is exactly, happiness or a good life, but I still believe that in every day, we can pick up little moments of happiness. And that is something that I really try to cultivate. What scares me the most, actually, is coming to the end of my life, turning around and saying to myself: it wasn’t so bad, but I didn’t realize it. .
A beautiful life
Editorial
336 pages