In In Between (Hurtubise, 2016) and Love disorders (2017), her first two novels, Marie Demers features Ariane and Marianne, two women in their late twenties who go around in circles, tirelessly repeating the same motives and errors, accumulating romantic failures, impossible ambitions and escapes. ahead.
However, after having exposed and explored her faults through her alter egos, the author felt the need to go further, to write what she had never wanted or dared to say, looking for what, in her Childhood wounds, his parents’ flaws and his relationship with men and authority could explain the impasses that were piling up in his life, fueling self-hatred coupled with ardent death urges.
In The diversionsborn following a serious depressive episode, the writer reveals herself in her most tortuous and tormented truth, devoting herself to an exercise in autofiction as daring as it is risky, pushed as much by her instinct as for her ” passion for hara-kiri”.
Here, Marie Demers returns to more or less known (but rarely glorious) facts of her stormy relationship with her mother, the author Dominique Demers, of her toxic loves, including her numerous suicide attempts, her passage to the side of accused in the latest wave of denunciations of the #MeToo movement, as well as by intimate details of his therapy.
The tone is raw, rough, devoid of any form of filter or aesthetic consideration. The novelist exploits all the powers of self-writing and literature to find her truth, extricate herself from the hated status of victim and perhaps even, if possible, begin a form of healing, despite judgments or the anger it could arouse. “Because it is these stories that keep me alive, the ones whose meaning I dig into and question what I have learned. Because this place that is specific to me and my vision that carries it cannot be endlessly burdened with what others will think of it. This book is mine and it is writing it for me that ensures my survival. »
Through its breathless cadence, the novel makes tangible the acute pain of a woman whose days go by without allowing us to rarely see the brilliance of the sky, like a series of waves breaking mercilessly, without the possibility of catching her breath, and this, until the very last pages.
Disordered, full of vain details, sweating with self-pity, The diversions annoys as much as it fascinates. Carried by the casual and voracious rhythm of those who have something to prove, this exposure stands out by its total absence of clichés, by its anger brandished at arm’s length and by a destabilizing authenticity which sends the reader back to its own contradictions and other internalized prejudices. An exercise whose undertow should not eclipse the courage.
Marie Demers will participate in a round table on “Writing therapy” on November 22 at the SLM, in addition
to offer signing sessions
November 22, 24 and 25.