The writer Simon Roy tells me about a rather sadistic scientific experiment, that of Curt Richter in the 1950s, where a rat was immersed in a jar of water to watch it swim until it drowned. The rat struggled for about 15 minutes before giving up. But if we took him out of the water after 15 minutes, sponged him up, reassured him and then put him back in the water, he could fight…for 60 hours.
Posted at 7:15 a.m.
Hope, which can be the cruellest thing in the world, is essential to the will to live, even when one is condemned. In September 2021, for the release of his novel Made by another, I believed that our interview was the last, because Simon was suffering from an aggressive brain cancer, for which he had been operated. Well no. Simon returns with a new book, my end of the worldhis fourth, written in a hurry because the cancer is also back, and this time it is inoperable.
“I surprise myself,” he said. Each book, basically, is the last. I shouldn’t even talk to you, because I should be dead, according to the predictions. I work with projects. If I had no plans, I would have let myself sink. »
The story of Richter’s rat comes from the book by his wife Marianne Marquis-Gravel, the first she will publish in the fall with Leméac and which tells what they have both been through since the fatal diagnosis. This outing is one of the most important appointments in Simon’s personal calendar, which places pebbles in the future as in the tale of Tom Thumb. Not just to find his way back, but also to pursue it.
In my end of the worldSimon Roy considers it a privilege to be able to organize his death, unlike those who die suddenly, without ever seeing anything coming.
“I live in a terrifying reality, but so beautiful. I swear I’ve never been happier than I’ve been in 15 months. The idea of my death gives me an incredible boost of life. I am in a state of gratitude. » But he admits there’s a dark side to it all, when he thinks about what he won’t live with his two children, aged 16 and 20, what Marianne will live without him, and probably with a other. They are so in love, he tells me, that he would have been ready to jump into the adventure of another child.
This is not the first time that Simon Roy surprises me, and worries me, I must add. I have been since his first novel, My Kubrick Red Lifewhere he mixed his analysis of the film The Shining of Stanley Kubrick and the personal tragedy of his mother’s suicide.
At our first meeting, seeing him overwhelmed by guilt towards the one who gave him life, I told him: “But Simon, you are the child in this dynamic. You are not responsible. His misty gaze pierced me, I remember it like it was yesterday.
“It was boredom that led me to write, he said in 2014. Boredom and tragedy. It may be the only book I will ever write in my life. At the limit, I almost wish…”
Simon Roy has come to his fourth book, and I don’t think he’s bored at the moment.
In My Kubrick Red Life, he spoke of his “macabre genealogy”, of the “metastases of the soul” of his mother, of the fact that the desire to live cannot be injected into the hospital. Between a mythomaniac father and a mother who had mental health problems, he had always felt in danger, like the little boy in the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. “Some do not hesitate to invest fortunes in long-term therapies,” he wrote. For my part, I clumsily try to convince myself that it is possible to win the Combat, to defeat the Minotaur hidden at the very heart of the labyrinth, going so far as to spit in the eye of death. »
I have nothing of an esoteric mind, but I sometimes wonder if a family fracture can prolong a fault even in the body of its descendants. He himself, a very rational type, sees omens in his early writings.
The labyrinth, I’m right in it, with my illness, and I’m trying to find the way. I think I find it through art, through projects, through love.
Simon Roy
Simon Roy has planned several short-term meetings, which are for him so many miracles to come in time. Like the recent show by Nick Cave, who dedicated a song to him. He wants to see the shows of Sigur Rós, Julien Clerc, Charlebois, take advantage of the release of his book and go to the launch of Marianne, in addition to organizing regular meetings with friends, some of whom he hasn’t seen in decades.
fear and hope
In my end of the worldfaithful to his style in fragments where seemingly unrelated subjects collide – something that comes to him from Stephen King, the author of The Shining –, it mixes the story of the famous radio adaptation by Orson Welles of War of the Worlds in 1938, the urban legend of a general panic in the United States in the face of the false invasion of extraterrestrials, the healing gifts of his uncle, the experiences of those who lived the afterlife, and this incredible coincidence: the child of the doctor who will be in charge of medical assistance in dying when the time comes for Simon to do so has the same cancer as him, in the same place of the brain, which gives the last and most poignant chapter of the book.
The driving force behind all of this? “Fear,” he replies. And, of course, hope.
Death is what awaits us all, but I feel that people who, like Simon, are too close to knowing it live in a hyperrealistic parallel reality, and the healthy live in a fiction. Perhaps we are even living in fiction until books wake us up – we must not forget that Simon Roy was a literature teacher very much appreciated by CEGEP students.
A few weeks ago, Simon Roy invited me, with my boyfriend, to a weekend with him and Marianne, and other friends, in a chalet in Charlevoix. This is part of the appointments he organizes; he even planned his last meal with relatives. “And I’m going to treat myself to an ostie of a good bottle of wine,” he laughs. I deal with my death. That’s the positive side. The negative side is that I want it to continue so badly. Jean Ferrat’s song Life is Beautiful, looks like I wrote it. »
Simon Roy compels me to write that this is not our last conversation. It also forces me to hope for this meeting in Charlevoix. “We’re going to have fun,” he told me, as if to reassure me, when it was he who had a gun to his head. But his goal is very clear: “I don’t want people to be relieved by my death. I want people to miss me and miss me. »
my end of the world
Simon Roy
great freedom
144 pages