Do we lose our essence by giving life? Do women dilute their intellectual capacities in the daily tasks related to children? If reading these questions makes you feel like you’re in an Elena Ferrante book, that’s normal. It is that the French author Julia Kerninon comes to feed in her own way these questions that inhabit many women in the stirring Touching solid groundextending her existential reflection on the relationship to motherhood initiated in her novel Liv Maria, but in a more frontal way since this time she is herself the subject of observation.
Posted at 6:00 p.m.
But contrary to the fatalism of the Italian writer who often portrays mothers on the run, Julia Kerninon believes, like Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, that motherhood does not prevent the cohabitation of all her overlapping identities, and that at their center, the mothers keep their identity and their hard core intact, where all their lives and all their stories are found.
She demonstrates it in this short and dense story which begins with the birth of her first child – “I thought that everything stopped there, whereas on the contrary, everything began” -, and her decision not to run away that day. But it was after the birth of the second that she “stopped wandering”, and this romantic and professional wandering, which she recounts in this raw and honest book, is also part of her.
For Julia Kerninon, these two facets are therefore not opposed and even if her life “after” has never been the same again, the essential, the writing, has been preserved, just like the intellectual requirement. “Every day I love my kids, I work, and I try to be a better writer. My life is neither behind nor in front of me, I am a grown woman, and it is time to write dense and serious prose like ivy. »
It is in a way the conclusion of this intimate essay with a very wide echo. And Julia Kerninon, with all her intelligence, but also with all her love, offers a deep and poetic, positive and lucid look at motherhood in what is most confronting… but also most beautiful.
Touching solid ground
Julia Kerninon
Annika Parance Editor
96 pages