AC In “Friendship,” the narrator imagines there’s a sociologist comparing her childhood home to that of her wealthier friend, Héloïse. Why bring in this sociologist?
CS The sociologist was a good tool for observation.There’s this idea in France that money and the bourgeoisie are disgusting. Money is disgusting because it comes less from entrepreneurship than from inheritance. Access to money is more closed. “Bourgeois” suggests a materialistic woman thinking only about her shoes. In modern literature, you would never find an empathetic character from a bourgeois family. If you come from that kind of family, you reject it. And I like to write about disturbing subjects … like death and the bourgeoisie. I wanted to be precise about class.
I went to a very particular school: liberal and not religious, a place where people put their children if they have social and intellectual ambitions for them. I’m coming from the bourgeoisie, upper-middle class but not old money, intellectual but not so intellectual. It’s very French.
I still live in the neighborhood, raise my children here, and have friends I’ve known since I was five. Clothes are signs of class. We wore specific shoes that were supposed to be better for you. Everyone wore agnès b. shirts. My mother wore Missoni. The brands change over time. Many of the shops I write about are closed now, but I wanted to mention them.
Equally important are the books my parents read. They were excited by the Serbian writer Peter Handke, who represented something new and revolutionary in literature. There was a central contradiction in their lives: They were more left than “democrat,” and they believed in paying taxes to finance education and the health system, yet they had a little money in a Swiss bank. This contradiction is still very prominent in France.
I have a friend who’s a very good writer, from working people. He loves the book and said that before he read it, he hadn’t realized there were these levels and differences. To him, the rich were just the rich.
AC “Swimming” must have been challenging to write because you had to narrate a break-up when you set out to write about a happy relationship.
CS I had to fight with myself. I’d go to my desk, write 1000 words, and cry. It was a sadistic pain. I had to remember how kind he was to me, how everything was destroyed. But when we met a couple of months prior, I was making fiction then too: when you’re in love, you make a fiction of the other person.
Writing isn’t therapy. It doesn’t soothe you. Writing felt like a way to convince him to come back. It was a performative book. And in this matter, it was a complete failure. When the book was published, I had to speak about it. People asked if I hoped he’d come back, and it was awful. And now I would say that I’m happy that it’s a good book and that the love story is over. It took me some years to understand that.
AC Did he read it?
CS He read it and loved it. It’s a very nice portrait of him.
AC “Seventeen” details your experiences many decades ago. How did that distance shape the story?
CS When you read Proust, you understand that the distance of the past doesn’t exist. Something that happened thirty years ago can be in your mind like it happened this morning. In “Seventeen,” there are things I don’t remember so precisely, but then I don’t remember some things that happened last week. The mind is not chronological. The question of time and years isn’t meaningful when I’m writing. It’s about obsession. Someone told me I have a very Talmudic way of writing, going back to the same things, like my childhood, again and again.
In the U.S., you have a category called memoir. I don’t understand it. People change things. They make it better, more suspenseful. It’s not the truth, though “truth” is very important in the U.S. I made the character of Gabriel such a kind and wonderful man, though he was cruel when he dumped me. I just wasn’t able to write that. Gabriel became a fictional character.
When I write, I try to recount everything as closely as what happened. But as soon as I start, I’m lying, inventing. I could say: “Colombe was doing this” or “was like that,” and it would be more accurate. My material is autobiographical: I use the story of my family and I make something of it, like a painter.
