This desire points me | I desire, we desire

If desire is born from lack, or outright absence, who better than a single person to explore the subject? Claire Legendre was, suffered this celibacy, and has since come out of it. Conversation with an ex-femcel.

A what ? Femcel, in reference to “incels”, these involuntary single men (cels), a female experience certainly less known, although not necessarily less suffering. Even if the name doesn’t say it. “What strikes me, in the feminine, is that the prefix “in” has disappeared. We no longer hear the involuntary dimension,” points out the author, met earlier this week to talk about her latest book, This desire points me.

Before going any further, a clarification: do not look for a play on words in the title, there is none. It is taken from a verse by the Renaissance poet Joachim du Bellay (Regrets), and by hurting, we mean here to hurt, to make suffer. In a word: the desire that hurts, and not the one that could be born (appear) on the horizon.

We will have understood, we are not exactly in joy or lightness here. The subject is not around celibacy by choice, but rather endured. Claire Legendre’s words, halfway between an essay and a story, written to the “I” and by definition very intimate, are disarmingly frank and lucid. Solitude is a “tunnel” for her, and celibacy “a humiliation”. Let’s just say she pulls no punches. “But because it’s true,” she admits completely, with a sense of humor that stands out in person. “Getting up alone every morning, spending your day and having no one to talk about it to, it’s heavy! » It must be said that this idea of ​​a “lesser value”, of “not having found a buyer”, “somewhere, there is a hidden defect, indeed! », she felt it well, for 10 years to boot, and she doesn’t hide it.

“I was an involuntary single woman from 2010 to 2020. That hadn’t happened to me before. I was not equipped to face it,” she writes from the outset, in this little book which can be read in one go, composed of short chapters and divided into sections: the desire for love, the desire to possess (or the art of consuming to fill a lack), desiring the desire of others, desiring the worst (or fantasizing about danger, to play with ideas that scare us), etc.

Note that she is no longer single since the pandemic. And it took her precisely this distance to be able to return to this subject, which inhabited her so much and which obviously still inhabits her, but differently. “It takes a certain perspective to write about personal experience. Reflection requires distance. […] But now that I have everything I need to feel good, can I still want what I have? », she asks herself now. Huge question, we’ll come back to it.

Explorations of desire

Don’t go looking for juicy details about his life here, you won’t find any. The author, who explored her fears in The water lily and the spider, is in the cerebral exploration, or let’s say the intellectualization of the question. His “I” is a kind of “we”, which includes the person who writes and who thinks.

Several passages on the “game” of dating sites, the planned obsolescence of women, and the art of desiring the inaccessible, such a singer, such an author, or such a personality, this “adolescent refuge”, as she says, go probably also speak to several readers. “It is less humiliating and much more comfortable to stay at home and listen to a melancholy song than to risk a date ! », says Claire Legendre, laughing, not without self-deprecation.

A clumsy friend once told her that she was “the writer of sexual frustration,” she also writes. And again, she assumes responsibility: “I find it violent and interesting to explore,” she replies.

Among other telling “explorations”: wanting to be desired, a very common narcissistic trap, according to the author.

A trap fed by the algorithm, we know, which gives us this illusion of having “all possibilities to infinity”. “And this plays a lot on our imaginations…” And our desires, cradled in hopes and as much (if not more) disillusionment.

After 10 years, the author finally found love (no, not online, you guessed it). “It’s my first happy ending in literature,” she says, still smiling. But not stupid, all the same! » Because it asks fundamental questions, it has been said: “Once we find this object of desire, will we always desire? […] Who am I in joy? » Big questions which could be the subject of a book in turn, which Claire Legendre will not write. “When you write that you are alone, you have nothing to lose,” she said wisely. But there, I would be afraid of spoiling a reality that I hold dear. […] My next book will clearly be… a novel! »

This desire points me

Claire Legendre

Leméac

151 pages