Me, Jessica M., 37 years old, mother… | Mom, unfortunately

Her name is Jessica M., she is 37 years old, a husband, two children, and she is trying to write a novel. Desperately.

How to combine motherhood and writing? Is this even possible? At what price ? The premise of Janis Locas’ latest novel (The cursed Quebecois) is sadly as old as the world. And let’s say that with Me, Jessica M., 37 years old, mother, unfortunatelypublished these days by Somme tout editions, the author bluntly drives home the point.

Be warned, it will bleed. Literally and figuratively.

Do you think you know the chorus? It’s a little more complicated here, and from the first lines, the author sets the table. Let us summarize: a young mother, Jessica Martin, finds herself on her porch one evening. She leaves behind her husband and children. She finally breathes, prepares to escape, already savors her “deliverance”. However, just as she is on the verge of disappearing into the night, a cough freezes her in place.

Correction: a cough leaves the narrator dead. Do you understand the nuance? In a book written like a novel within a novel, with multiple interplays, Janis Locas enjoys blurring the lines, which makes her text all the more powerful, and her point felt. The reader is completely stopped dead in his tracks, like the narrator, probably the author, we guess.

And we’re guessing right. Met at her home this week to discuss it, Janis Locas does not hide it. There is a lot of her in this narrator who is trying at all costs to write a novel, or rather a biography, it should be noted, a writing that allows her to breathe a little poetry into her life, moreover. rather dull and archi-routine, punctuated with tasks and other noses to unclog.

A biography of who? A certain “Dave Feu”.

“It started from an idea 15 years ago, to write a novel about Dave St-Pierre,” Janis Locas immediately confirms. I met him in secondary 5, the year he became seriously ill. » She had completely forgotten him over the years. It was during a girls’ dinner, as an adult, that she made the connection: “So let’s see, little Dave, so self-effacing, silent, has become a completely trashy choreographer? »

Thus the idea of ​​a biography was born. Easier said than done. Because at the same time, Janis Locas, also director of communications (Locas Communication), was also pregnant, in the middle of her second maternity leave. Can you guess what happens next?

She will meet the choreographer twice to keep him informed of the project. He will also give him “carte blanche” (“but don’t hurt my mother, she doesn’t need that!”).

At the beginning of her writing, Janis Locas was still “in denial”, she pointed out: “I had an impossible life as a young mother, a partner who worked hard, I spent my weekends alone with the children , including one very ill. And I tried to stay the course: doing what I did before. […] And it made me seriously ill. » No, any resemblance to the novel is not at all coincidental.

“But be careful, it’s not real life, it’s a work,” she also reminds us, among other things through all these webs woven into the text.

Many inequalities

Here we dare to ask the question head-on: is it really so fundamentally incompatible, writing and raising children? It’s not an open question, but our interlocutor has a lot to say on the subject: “Oh my God,” she responds straight away.

“The spouse may be a really good guy, but there was never any question of him working part-time, or not working overtime,” she continues. And I, personally, arrived in a space where de facto, I was second. The spouse’s job will come first. Even today, it is the figures that speak: it is mothers who take 45 of the 52 weeks of parental leave. And then afterwards, the traps are set…”

Note that if the title reminds you of another, you are not alone. And even if she doesn’t allude to it at all in the book, Janis Locas sees several parallels between her Jessica M. and the cult novel Me, Christiane F., 13 years old, drug addict, prostitute (brought to the screen in 1981), two stories of distress and isolation, quite moving thank you. “I found the parallel interesting. It’s a book I read when I was 12. In both cases: the central character is an untypical woman […] who wants power. […] It’s much more tragic for Christiane F., […] my character does not take heroin, but medication which will also lead to decline,” she slips.

Rest assured: as for her children, she will, over the pages, slowly but tenderly, end up experiencing beautiful moments of poetry with them (and their little puns are truly beautiful). Here or there, but not all the time. The novel ends on a note of hope. She owed that to her readers, Janis Locas tells us here. “To all those who have recognized themselves, we must leave a way out,” she says. I didn’t want my Jessica M. to be a victim, I wanted her to find solutions. » We’ll let you discover which ones.

Me, Jessica M., 37 years old, mother, unfortunately

Janis Locas

All in all

245 pages