Suburban gem | Encyclopedia of the rebellious woman

Sara Hébert stumbles across a thrift store one day on the paparmane pink cover of The Canadian Woman’s Encyclopedia (1966), in which Michelle Tisseyre offers “solutions to women to resolve the problems which assail them”. The same ambition drives suburban gem, although in a much more punk spirit. “I wondered, says the author and collagist, what would we find in women’s magazines if the girls we see there were our friends, for real. »

Dominic Late
The Press

“As far back as I can remember, says Sara Hébert, I have always made mustaches and teeth in ladies’ magazines. A gesture of gentle subversion—humanizing these figures of perfection by making them ugly—has since become an art in its own right for the author, who launches with suburban gem his first “real” book, but who has signed several zines over the past dozen years with rude titles like Sow salad Where How to become a big dog.

Born in Laval, Sara Hébert, 37, spent her adolescence in Mirabel, but took the bus as often as possible to attend punk shows in Montreal, where she was resting from a sometimes stormy family home. However, it was not until 2010, when a lover took her to Expozine, that she came into contact with the undeniably punk community of the zine, a word designating a small, artisanal and deliberately crude publication, created with the means at hand. and sold for a “handful of change”.

Sara Hébert was writing a memoir on the learned journals of the 18th century^e century when he met this effervescent community of resourceful artisans — the next edition of Expozine takes place on November 19 and 20 at the Saint-Arsène church. “I was just like, ‘Holy shit what it is hot that it exists! Let’s see, I had never heard of this before.” »

A style of her own

The memoir takes over, and Sara Hébert quickly fashions a style of her own by playing with scissors in old copies from the 1960s of magazines such as Marie Clairewhose photos she hijacks with insolent messages, urging women to reject all models.

A kitsch aesthetic, somewhere between the benevolence of Janette Bertrand and the straight finger of the Riot grrrl, between the immaculate smiles of the late magazine lady at home and the kamikazes of Josée Yvon, which finds its culmination in suburban gem, an “illustrated satirical autofiction” in which Madame Bijou provides “reflections and advice” around seven major questions, including “Why do I cling to crooked princes? and “Do I have the right to exist as I am?” “.

And if the incendiary irony of Sara Hébert needles each of her collages, this humor always smolders the fear that the proverbial woman of today, after three waves of feminism, has not freed herself from the domestications that the images stage. d’Épinal that she hijacks.

“Many women are still trying to flourish through the couple, marriage, family. It is imposed as tricks to succeed”, observes the one who has worked for a long time at CISM and who is now a director at ICI Musique.

Diary of a young woman who constantly puts her own needs aside, suburban gem is also based on texts of phenomenal transparency, often burlesque, sometimes tragic, in which Sara Hébert talks about her romantic encounters, her atypical professional career and masturbation — suburban gem is in this sense the perfect guide for the lady who takes charge, both figuratively and literally.

Her encyclopedia thus sometimes takes on the appearance of a competition for the weakest guy or downright tata, whose narrator tolerates laziness and inconsistencies with an abnegation worthy of Thérèse of Avila.

A woman who not only does not hurt the other, but also takes care of everyone: this is the archetype celebrated by The Canadian Woman’s Encyclopedia and what reverses Suburban gem. “Many of us still choose the feelings of others before our own, regrets Sara Hébert. Advertising would have us believe that freedom is a sheath, but that’s not freedom. »

suburban gem

Sara Hebert

leaf merchant

352 pages