Why did you write The missing ?
I wanted to write about the many crises. The ecological crisis. The migrant crisis. The crisis of heterosexuality and the couple. The ideals and values advocated in the West rely on personal fulfillment and the accumulation of goods. Then there was the pandemic, the shortages. People are constantly stressed by the slightest tension in their personal lives. This is the starting pretext for this thriller, the visit to the police station. It leads to the pooling of assets, to the return to agriculture and the manufacture of objects, without the intermediary of capitalism.
The migrant in The missing is an American.
Joan is Métis, of Cherokee father. Her friends are going to demonstrate on the Place de la République, but she cannot. She has to make a living like baby sitter. Even on the left there are subclasses. Underpaid teachers. The foreigners. The prostitutes.
With your latest work, Stranger’s Autobiographyyou announced that you would write differently.
It was a turning point. I have been freed from certain monsters. As a teenager, I had traumas, the catastrophe of sexuality. I can immerse myself fully in fiction, instead of waging a battle with literature against personal knots. I can tell things that are not strictly part of my life, defend certain ideas. Highlight a political world.
How do you judge your first novels now?
They were populated by the imagination of what is desirable. The couple with children. But the model is flawed. Patriarchy wants women to be mothers all the time. We are not offered anything else.
The man in The missing is more than absent, it is negative.
I wanted to propose a community of women. Not good sisters. A proposal of desirable happiness. Women are wronged, flouted, disappointed. Everything that is produced by our monotheistic culture is propaganda that offers subjection as happiness. Women must wait for men. But they are no longer fooled. They make the revolution. I chose like these women to live with much less money. Feminism and the end of capitalism are closely linked.
Can men make amends?
It would require a huge effort of deconstruction. Few men can accept it.
You speak of decline, of living with less, but you have collected the youth archives of Alix Cléo Roubaud.
It’s a very small box in a wardrobe. We must change how we consume, how we dress, how we eat, how we move. Buy less. Archives do not fit into the consumerist logic, into the accumulation of pretty brands. It is not the same type of object.
Yet for a few years, you have been covering gastronomy in the newspaper Release.
I am interested in very small producers, who want to do everything with respect for nature. They are in the logic of degrowth. They ask themselves questions such as global warming, water shortage, use of phytosanitary products. Wine is presented today as a luxury product, but its foundations are in civilizations well before capitalism. I receive bottles of wine all the time, but I’m not talking about the big production of LVMH, especially not, but about the small producer who lives in a cabin.
Responses have been edited for brevity.
The missing
Marie-Eve Lacasse
Threshold
253
An earlier version of this article stated that Marie-Ève Lacasse had experienced “the abandonment of a father”. However, this is not the case at all. Our apologies to the author and her family. It was also indicated that the author had collected the archives of the American woman of letters Natalie Barney. However, she rather collected the youth archives of Alix Cléo Roubaud. She has also never published an essay, contrary to what was indicated in our original article.
Language and Quebec
A question about the Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Annie Ernaux, whose work notably examines the social and linguistic codes linked to social classes, led Marie-Ève Lacasse to talk about the permanent challenge that exiles have in the face of language. “Recently, I realized that even after 20 years in Paris, I still artificially analyze language, small codes, references, gestures. When I return to Quebec, I feel enormous relief. I regain an instinctive understanding of language. It’s a background noise that stops. »
Who is Marie-Eve Lacasse?
Born in 1982 in Outaouais, Marie-Ève Lacasse publishes her first collection of short stories, Masksat the age of 14, and won the literary competition of the Right. She studied at the Sorbonne in literature and was naturalized French in 2013.
two of his novels, So do they all (2005) and Genesis of Oblivion (2006), are published under the pseudonym of Clara Ness.
His novel Peggy in the headlights, published in 2017, told the life of Peggy Roche, the companion of Françoise Sagan. He won the special jury prize for the Simone-Veil prizes the same year.