How did you come to develop your method of bibliotherapy?
I published my first novel 35 years ago, at the same time as I opened my physiotherapy practice. For me it has always gone together – the body, the text, talking to people, listening to them talk about their pain or their worries and writing. This is why I talk about “taking care” with reading. […] Physiotherapy allowed me to come into contact with the reality and needs of those who are not great readers. And it is precisely because I am a hybrid – caregiver and creator – that I understood at one point that I had to bring together these two threads of my life to be able to speak to people in suffering.
You write that “a good book is an assured presence that comforts us.” What is a good book?
In my previous book, Books take care of us [paru en 2015], we understand that I am totally opposed to prescription, that is to say people who say to you: “Are you going through a divorce? Read this book, it will do you good. » First, because it is a seizure of power over the other; then, because it’s not sure that it will do him any good. How could we imagine for a second that we control the effects produced by one text on the other? It’s not because it did me good that it will do good for others. On the other hand, what I noticed and which is precisely my teaching, is that what affects us is not necessarily rational things. […] It’s not just the meaning of the text; it can be the poetry, the musicality of things… It’s not necessarily the book alone, but it’s also the person who passes it on, who will perhaps start to read it aloud.
PHOTO RÉGINE DETAMBEL, PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR
Régine Detambel
You mention in the book how the evening story affects the parent-child relationship…
She acts physically; it makes the literary text a bodily, concrete and sensitive link between the two people. We are beings of language, and if we are each on our phones playing candy Crush, nothing happens, there is no transmission, story, narration; we are not doing human work. Humans, their job, since the first campfires of the Paleolithic, is to tell stories, tell stories and listen to others tell stories. Nancy Huston, who I really like, says, “We’re a fabulous breed. We tell our lives more than we live them, we tell ourselves about them more than we live them. » Everything is literature, in fact. Everything responds to a narrative and the self-narrative that we tell ourselves. And the texts that we read or that are read to us come to replay, soften, enrich, flesh out things that can sometimes be petrified.
Moreover, you write that books have this power “to tear one away from oneself and one’s ruminations”. How can people who have lost the connection with reading, or who have never had one, find texts that will do them good if we do not have to recommend them to them?
One solution is to randomly enter the library or bookstore, leaf through the books, open a page at random and listen to what is being said. My work, for 15 years, has been to train people in my method of bibliotherapy. So that these people who do not read, who no longer read or who can no longer read can find someone who will accompany them [avec un texte] : how does this affect you? What does that generate? How does that fill you up? We don’t have the right to tell people: you have to read, it will save you, etc. This is not true. When I was little, there were books that horrified me. We’re not going to make ourselves believe that books save people. That would be too easy… Don Quixote has gone crazy reading chivalric novels!
You also emphasize that books work on our empathy. How ?
About ten years ago, when neuroscientists started working a lot on empathy, they realized that readers were more empathetic than non-readers. It’s because of the training, the gymnastics that you do when you go from one character to another and you put on the other’s costume; you feel what he feels and you know how to put yourself in a hollow position. Non-readers are much more rigid in a way. Fiction is like giving you acting lessons!
Read to connect: Bibliotherapy in full voice
South Acts
208 pages