If Liv runs along the banks of the St. Lawrence, in Verdun, it is both to follow in her mother’s footsteps and to dispel the pain of her absence.
Posted at 8:00 p.m.
With The inner mother, Sophie Marcotte thus speaks both of the places that her heroine inhabits like a prison handcuffing her to her past, and of an anchorage, allowing her to emancipate herself from what this past carries with it with suffering. In a narration in the I that oscillates between the dissolute daily life of a café waitress and her childhood memories, the author signs with this second book what should be called a learning novel, in the most strong of the term. Because it is the most inadmissible learning that Liv faces: that of the injustice of this existence, which takes what is most precious to us without warning.
Waltz between many lovers whom she refuses to call by their real first names, hypochondriac to the point of being “ready to have her breast cut in two like a grenadine to inspect each ball separately, in order to find the real pomegranate among the fruit”, Liv is this proverbial twenty-something who has just come back from everything, already so old and yet so young. Despite this threadbare frame, The inner mother easily manages to find his grace, especially in his little moments: a father who forces his daughter to sing Dance Me to the End of Lovea meeting between the narrator and a former colleague of her mother, one happy Sunday morning with the family.
In a scene from childhood, Liv puts together a puzzle with her mother, a chapter that contains all the beautiful chimerical project of this sad and sweet novel, carried by the hope that the memory of those we have loved ones are never completely confused: “The image [du casse-tête] obsesses me for more than an hour and I don’t even remember what it represents, that’s what annoys me: the evaporation of images that you have to remember to put everything together. »
The inner mother
Sophie Marcotte
house on fire editions
240 pages