All summer, franceinfo makes you discover surprising or unknown professions through the column “Is it really your job?”. Tuesday July 25: the profession of hospital biographer, with Claire Liagre.
“I have the impression that we are two friends”, confides Ghislaine. The 60-year-old suffers from lung cancer. This is already the tenth time that Claire Liagre has sat opposite her during one of her immunotherapy sessions, in the heart of the oncology department of the Louis Pasteur hospital in Chartres, to collect her memories. “I have so much to tell!”
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Facing Ghislaine, block on her knees, Claire Liagre listens, and takes everything down. “Dad, it was the apple pies. Every Sunday, he made us one, with the homemade dough, and we, the children, were all the children around to be able to eat the small pieces of pasta that remained”, remembers the patient. Childhood reminiscences, moments of joy, slumps. Claire Liagre writes, questions, plunges Ghislaine back into her own life.
“I relive my youth, the beautiful life I lived. What could be better? It’s too beautiful. If I hadn’t been sick, I would never have imagined one day doing a biography.”
This biography is really considered here as one treatment among others, financed directly by the hospital or by sponsors. Claire Liagre, a former journalist, has been writing for a year and a half. “People still arrive very fragmented in their body, in their soul, she says. So the fact like that of being able to tell oneself is to rebuild oneself, it is to say to oneself ‘my life is really something. Yes, I have a sense of humor. Yes, I did things. Yeah, I’ve been resilient in times that felt completely lost somewhere.'”
At the end, a book “for love to be convenable“
These life stories then take the form of a hand-bound book, a marbled paper, given to the patient, or to his family if he is deceased. “It’s an object that crosses time, which is sometimes intended for children who are still too small to read it.explains Claire Liagre. There are people here that we follow who die very young with small children. So you need an object that holds up, that is beautiful, an open door between the dead and the living so that love can always be called upon by the family.”
Invented fifteen years ago, the profession of hospital biographer is now exercised by around twenty people in France. The association that federates them, “Passeurs de mots et d’histoire”, hopes to soon have one per department.