The Martins E-Book

David Foenkinos

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 284

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Is it true that every life is the stuff of novels? Or are some people just too ordinary?This is the question a struggling Parisian writer asks when he challenges himself to write about the first person he sees when he steps outside his apartment. Secretly hoping to meet the beautiful woman who occasionally smokes on his street, he instead sets eyes on octogenarian Madeleine. She's happy to become the subject of his project, but first she needs to put her shopping away.Wondering if his project is doomed to be hopelessly banal, he soon finds himself tangled in the lives of Madeleine's family. Though calm on the surface, the Martins have secrets, troubles and woes, and the writer discovers that the most compelling story is that of an ordinary life.

Leseprobe

David Foenkinos is the author of 17 novels. His books have been translated into 40 languages. His novel Delicacy was made into a film starring Audrey Tautou. He received the 2014 Prix Renaudot and Prix Goncourt des lycéens for Charlotte.

Sam Taylor is an author and former correspondent for The Observer. His translations include Laurent Binet’s HHhH, Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby and Maylis de Kerangal’s The Heart, for which he won the French-American Foundation Translation Prize.

THE MARTINS

David Foenkinos

Translated from the French by Sam Taylor

Pushkin Press

A Gallic Book

First published in France as La famille Martin

by Éditions Gallimard

Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, 2020

English translation copyright © Sam Taylor, 2022

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Gallic Books,

12 Eccleston Street, London, SW1W 9LT

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention

No reproduction without permission

All rights reserved

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-18-05333-66-1

Typeset in Fournier MT by Gallic Books

Printed in the UK by CPI (CR0 4YY)

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

The value of coincidence equals the degree of its improbability.

Milan Kundera

1

I was struggling to write. I was going round in circles. For years I’d invented the stories I wrote, rarely tapping into reality. I was working on a novel about a writers’ workshop. The action took place during a weekend devoted to words. But I couldn’t find those words. My characters made my head spin with boredom. Any real-life story would be better than this, I thought. Any non-fictional existence. Often during book signings, readers would come up to me and say: ‘You should write about my life – it’s incredible!’ This was almost certainly true. I could go into the street, stop the first person I met, ask them for a few biographical details, and whatever they told me would, I felt sure, inspire me more than anything I could make up myself. That was how it started. I actually told myself: go out into the street and the first person you see will be the subject of your next book.

2

There was a travel agency below my apartment; I walked past that strange, dimly lit office every day. One of the women who worked there would often come outside to smoke a cigarette. She would stand there, practically motionless, staring at her phone. I would sometimes wonder what she was thinking about, because I do believe that total strangers have lives of their own. So that day I went outside and thought: if she’s there, on her cigarette break, she will be the heroine of my next novel.

But the smoker wasn’t there. A minute sooner or later and I might have been her biographer. Instead my eye was caught by the sight of an elderly woman crossing the road, pulling a purple shopping trolley. This old woman didn’t know it yet, but she had just entered the literary realm. She had just become the main character in my new book (assuming she agreed to my suggestion, of course). I could have waited for inspiration or for a more appealing character. But no, the rule I’d set myself was to write about the first person I saw. There was no alternative. I hoped that this orchestrated coincidence would lead to an exciting story, or towards the kind of insight that allows you to understand something important about life. I had great expectations for this woman.

3

I went up to her and apologised for bothering her. I spoke with the honeyed politeness of a salesman. She slowed down, looking surprised. I explained that I lived nearby, that I was a writer. When you stop someone who’s walking, you have to get straight to the point. It’s often said that old people are suspicious of strangers, but she immediately rewarded me with a big smile. I felt confident enough to tell her about my plan.

‘So … I’d like to write a book about you.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I know this might seem a bit strange, but … It’s a sort of challenge that I set myself. I live just over there,’ I added, pointing to my apartment building. ‘I’ll spare you the details but basically I decided that I was going to write about the first person I met in the street.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Could I buy you a coffee now so I can explain?’

‘Now?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t. I have to go home. I have things I need to put in the freezer.’

‘Ah, right, I understand,’ I replied, wondering if my story was already becoming pathetic. I was excited about the possibilities of my idea, yet here I was having to write about the necessity of not letting frozen products thaw. A few years after winning the Prix Renaudot, I felt the shiver of decline run down my spine.

I said I could wait for her in the café at the end of the street, but she told me to come with her instead. By asking me to follow her home, she immediately showed her trust in me. In her shoes, I would never have let a writer into my apartment that easily. Particularly a writer in search of inspiration.

4

A few minutes later I was sitting alone in her living room while she busied herself in the kitchen. To my surprise, I was overcome by emotion. Both my grandmothers had died years before; it had been a long time since I’d found myself in an old woman’s apartment. Her home was so similar to my memories of theirs: the plastic tablecloth, the loudly ticking clock, the faces of grandchildren in gold-coloured frames. With a pang I remembered those visits. We never said much, but I enjoyed our conversations.

My heroine returned carrying a tray. On it was a cup and a few biscuits. She hadn’t thought to have anything at all herself. To reassure her, I gave a brief summary of my career, but she didn’t seem worried anyway. It had clearly not even crossed her mind that I might be an impostor or a manipulator, a dangerous man. Later I asked her why she’d been so trusting. ‘You looked like a writer,’ she replied, leaving me slightly confused. To me, most writers look lecherous or depressed. Sometimes both. Anyway, as far as this woman was concerned, I looked the way I was supposed to look.

I was impatient to discover the subject of my new novel. Who was she? First of all, I needed to know her family name.

‘Tricot,’ she said.

‘Tricot, like knitting?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And your first name?’

‘Madeleine.’

So I was in the presence of Madeleine Tricot. I felt doubtful for a few seconds. It was not a name I could ever have invented. I have sometimes spent whole weeks trying to think up a character’s name, convinced as I was that the sound of a name has an influence on a person’s fate. It even helped me to understand certain temperaments. A Nathalie could never act like a Sabine. With every name I invented, I would weigh up the pros and cons. And now, suddenly, without any procrastination, I found myself with Madeleine Tricot. That’s one advantage of reality: it saves time.

On the other hand, there is a fairly sizeable disadvantage: the lack of any alternative. I’d already written a novel about a grandmother and the issues of ageing. Was I going to be stuck with this theme again? It didn’t really excite me, but I had to accept all the consequences of my plan. What would be the point if I started to sidestep reality? After thinking about it, I decided that it wasn’t merely coincidence that I had met Madeleine: once writers hit on a favourite theme, they are doomed to keep writing about it for life.1

1. Then again, walking the streets of Paris’s seventeenth arrondissement at ten in the morning, I was hardly likely to bump into a go-go dancer.

5

Madeleine had lived in the neighbourhood for forty-two years. It was possible I’d already seen her around, although her face didn’t seem familiar. I was relatively new to the area, but I did spend hours walking the streets to help myself think. I was one of those novelists for whom writing is like annexing a territory.

Madeleine must know about the lives of lots of people around here, I thought. She must have seen children grow up and neighbours die; she must be aware of the ghosts of old bookshops hiding behind shiny new supermarkets. There is undoubtedly a certain pleasure to be found in spending your whole life in the same place. What struck me as a geographical prison was a world of familiar landmarks, protective and comforting. My excessive love of escape often led me to move house (I was also the kind of person who never took off their coat in a restaurant). The truth was that I preferred to leave behind the scenes of my past, whereas Madeleine was constantly surrounded by memories. When she walked past her daughters’ school, she perhaps saw them running towards her again, throwing their arms around her neck and shouting ‘Maman!’

While we weren’t yet close, our discussion had got off to a good start. We conversed so effortlessly that, after a few minutes, it seemed to me that we had both forgotten the context of our meeting. This is confirmation of a simple fact: people like talking about themselves. A human being is a walking autobiographical novel. I sensed that Madeleine was thrilled by the idea someone might be interested in her. So where would we start? I didn’t want to tell her which memories to unwrap first. In the end she asked: ‘Should I tell you about my childhood?’

‘If you like. But you don’t have to. We could start with any period of your life.’

She looked slightly lost at this. She wanted me to guide her through the labyrinth of her past. But just as I was about to begin questioning her, she turned to look at a small framed photograph.

‘We could talk about René, my husband,’ she said. ‘He died a long time ago … So he’d like it if we talked about him first.’

‘Ah, okay …’ I replied, noting that in addition to all my living readers, I now also had to please the dead.

6

Madeleine took a deep breath, like a diver, as if her memories were hiding somewhere at the bottom of the sea. And she started to talk. She’d met René in the late sixties, at a Bastille Day party held in a fire station. She and a friend of hers had gone to the party in search of some handsome hunk they could dance with. But it was a rather puny man who approached her. Madeleine immediately warmed to him. She sensed he was not the kind of man who was in the habit of chatting up strange girls. And she was right. He must have felt something rare, in his body or his heart, to have dared approach her like that.

René told her later the reasons for his attraction. According to him, she looked exactly like the actress Michèle Alfa. Just like me, Madeleine had never heard of Michèle Alfa. It was true that she didn’t make many films after the war. When she found the actress’s photograph in a magazine, young Madeleine was surprised: there was only a vague resemblance. At most, you could describe the two women as being slightly similar. But for René, Madeleine was practically Michèle Alfa’s double. The source of his emotion went much further back, to a terrifying episode from his childhood. During the war, his mother had been part of a Resistance network. Pursued by the Milice, she had hidden her young son in a cinema.2 Poor, frightened René had clung to the faces on the screen, and Michèle Alfa’s became, for him, an unforgettably reassuring image. So it was that, over twenty years later, he glimpsed the ghost of his protector in the eyes of a woman at a firemen’s ball. Madeleine asked him the title of the film. L’aventure est au coin de la rue, he replied: Adventure awaits at the corner of the street. I was stunned but tried not to show it. The title seemed to nod uncannily to the concept behind my new book.

Madeleine had been thirty-three at the time. All her female friends were already married with children. She thought perhaps it was time for her to ‘settle down’ too. She explained that she was using this expression – ‘se ranger’ – with reference to the title of Simone de Beauvoir’s book Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée, which had been published in the years prior to her encounter with René. She didn’t want to disrespect her husband’s memory but preferred to be straightforward with me: at the time she had been motivated more by reason than by passion. It was nice and reassuring to be loved by a man who was so sure of his feelings for her; so nice that she was able to forget the truth of her own feelings. Over time, René’s kindness and consideration won her heart and in the end there could be no doubt: Madeleine loved him. But she never felt for him the devastating rapture she had felt for her first love.

She paused for a moment, clearly reluctant to talk about something so painful. Some scars never heal, I thought. Of course I was intrigued by this allusion to an apparently tragic passion. In terms of my novel, it was a promising prospect. But she had shown so much spontaneous trust in me that I didn’t want to rush her by asking her to elaborate on that brief mention. She would return to it later. And while I cannot now reveal the things that I learned in the weeks and months that followed, I can certainly say that this intense love affair would form an important part of my story.

For now, let’s stick with René. After their first meeting at the party, they agreed to see each other again soon. A few months later, they were married. And a few years after that, they were parents. Stéphanie was born in 1974, Valérie in 1975. Back then, it was unusual to become a mother in one’s late thirties. Madeleine had delayed the moment mostly for professional reasons. And while she enjoyed motherhood, she struggled with the consequences that it had on her career. She regarded this as an injustice perpetrated against women by a patriarchal society. ‘And my husband started working longer hours, so I was often left alone with the children …’ she said in a voice still tinged with bitterness. But it seemed fairly pointless to blame a dead man.

René probably didn’t realise how frustrated his wife felt. He was proud of his career at the RATP, the Paris public transport company. After starting out as a train driver on the metro, he ended up as one of the RATP’s highest-ranking executives. For him, the company was a second family, and retirement struck him like a guillotine blade. Madeleine found herself alone with a sad, lost man. ‘He couldn’t stand doing nothing,’ she kept repeating, her voice growing quieter each time. He had died twenty years before, but when she spoke about him the emotion still seemed raw. René would get up each morning like a soldier without a war. His wife encouraged him to take evening classes or do volunteer work, but he rejected all her suggestions. In truth, he had been deeply wounded by the way all his former colleagues had gradually turned their backs on him. He came to realise that all these friendships he had developed over years were in fact hollow and meaningless, and everything seemed pointless, absurd. He was diagnosed with colon cancer, which enabled him to find a label for his vague sense of decline. His funeral took place barely a year after his retirement and many of his former colleagues turned up. Madeleine looked at them one by one, without a word. Some of them gave speeches at the ceremony, praising him as a moral, warm-hearted man, but René was no longer there to hear these belated proofs of undying friendship. His wife considered their behaviour pathetic but kept her thoughts to herself. Instead she basked in memories of the tenderness, the peaceful harmony that she and René had shared. They’d accomplished so much together, been through so many joyous and painful experiences, and now it was all over.

Madeleine talked about René in such a vivid way that I half expected him to join us in the living room at any moment. To me, this was the most beautiful form of posterity: continuing to exist in someone else’s heart. I wondered how people coped with losing the love of their life. To spend forty or fifty years with someone, sometimes feeling as if they were your own reflection, and then one day the mirror is empty. You must reach out with your hand to touch the wind, feel strange movements in the bed, speak words that are transformed into a hollow conversation. You don’t live alone, but with an absence.

2. This story reminds me of the film director Claude Lelouch, who has often recounted how his own mother would leave him for entire days in darkened cinemas during the Occupation, leading him towards his future vocation.

7

After a while Madeleine said: ‘Perhaps we could visit him at the cemetery?’ I politely dodged this, claiming that I didn’t feel I really belonged there. That was just an excuse. Above all, I didn’t want to end up writing a novel whose main purpose was to water flowers by a graveside. I preferred to stick with the living. So I brought up the subject of her daughters. The mere mention of Stéphanie’s name was enough to create a tension in the room. I couldn’t question Madeleine directly; I had to be patient, certain that I would eventually succeed in clearing up any grey areas.

Stéphanie had gone to live in Boston after meeting an American man. Listening to Madeleine, you might have thought that her daughter was simply determined to marry a foreigner, as if any man would do as long as he wasn’t French. Madeleine didn’t seem to know very much about her son-in-law. The few times she’d seen him, he’d always been incredibly smiley. But according to her, his smile was like a crack in a wall: it was all you could see, blotting out all awareness of the wall itself or the house around it. He worked in a bank, but Stéphanie never went into any detail about him. All her conversations with her mother took place on Skype, and Madeleine despaired that she could only communicate with her daughter and her two granddaughters via a computer screen, that she couldn’t hug or kiss them. And then there was the language problem: she couldn’t understand why Stéphanie didn’t speak French with her children. Madeleine would hear the little girls say ‘Hello Mamie’ or ‘Happy birthday, Mamie’ in English. It was like another barrier that her daughter had built to keep her out.

Thankfully, Valérie lived locally and came to see her almost every day. Madeleine started to smile: ‘There’s one of them I never see, and the other one I see a bit too often!’ Even if this wasn’t laugh-out-loud funny, I considered it a good sign that my heroine had a sense of humour. But I also thought it admirable that a woman my own age should go to visit her mother so often, always asking her if she needed anything. Valérie must be dependable, I thought, the kind of person who shoulders all the responsibility for family difficulties, who lives a life of permanent self-sacrifice. This was pure speculation, however, since Madeleine didn’t linger on the subject of her daughters. My overriding impression was of a distance between the two sisters. Later I would learn that they were no longer on speaking terms and discover the reasons for their conflict, which went back many years.

8

I was happy with our first conversation. My book was progressing more quickly than I could have hoped. All the same, I am always slightly suspicious of anything that comes easily; it seems to foretell disaster. I am a pessimist by nature; I prefer to anticipate disappointment. I was desperately hoping Madeleine’s life would not end up as yet another unfinished novel.

For now, there was no reason to fear such an outcome. She opened up spontaneously and I let her drift through her memories, making no attempt to guide her. After quickly moving on from the subject of her daughters, she began to tell me about her professional life. She had worked as a dressmaker, notably for Karl Lagerfeld. I interrupted her: didn’t she think it was strange that she’d ended up in that line of work when her surname, Tricot, meant ‘knitting’? As if it was predestined …3 It quickly occurred to me that she must have had to put up with this kind of comment all her life, and that I was showing a sad lack of subtlety. But she explained that it was her husband’s surname and that she’d already begun her career before she met him. It was true, however, that René had said to her on their second date: ‘You’re a dressmaker and my name is Tricot. We’re made for each other.’ So he hadn’t been very subtle or inventive either. But Madeleine had smiled, and sometimes a whole life can begin with a smile.

I took advantage of this turn in our conversation to ask her what she thought of Karl Lagerfeld. ‘He was the simplest man imaginable,’ she replied. ‘No complexity at all. Completely transparent.’ This was not really the image I had of him. Surreptitiously I allowed myself a little mental digression: this information was good news for my book. If ever Madeleine became a little dull – from a literary point of view, I mean – I could always sprinkle the book with juicy details about the famous German designer. Lagerfeld could be my Get Out of Jail Free card.

In a voice filled with wonder, she described what seemed to have been the best years of her life: the Chanel years. She would never forget Lagerfeld’s arrival, at a moment when the fashion house had lost its prestige. There had even been talk of the company going bust. When the designer turned up for the first time, he silently walked through every floor of the building. To the Chanel employees, his wanderings seemed interminable. Nobody knew what he was going to do: would he agree to become the house’s chief designer? He looked attentively at the fabrics, soaked up the atmosphere of the place. Madeleine thought him very handsome. In contrast to what you might expect, he was not a fast man. He was a book lover and he walked at the leisurely pace of someone turning the pages of a novel. At last he came over to Madeleine and asked her a few questions: How long had she worked there? What did she think of the company? How did she see the future? It was this that she had never forgotten about him: how straightforward and direct he was; the way he took the time to think, and to listen to those around him. That evening he’d returned with a few sketches. He hadn’t said yes, but his agreement was implicit. And that was how Chanel was reborn.

Madeleine was in her late forties at the time. Her daughters were teenagers; they needed less looking after. So she was able to throw herself into her work as never before. She enjoyed the excitement of the fashion shows, when the whole team would be caught up in the hysteria backstage. Lagerfeld’s muse in those years was the model Inès de La Fressange – a lovely, elegant woman, according to Madeleine. ‘She even came to my leaving party! She didn’t have to do that …’ Once again, Madeleine appeared emotional when talking about the past. For her, it all seemed so close. There are certain periods in the distant past that you feel you can almost reach out and touch.

She smiled as she described some of the excesses of the fashion business. Each collection took on crazy proportions, driven by the feeling that they could invent an era with a scrap of fabric. This sent everyone slightly mad. She remembered so many arguments that, with the benefit of hindsight, seemed pointless, trivial; idiots fighting over passing fads … Well, they were all equal now, under the ground. Talk of this feverish past brought Madeleine to the contemplation of her humdrum present. Perhaps my project would bring a different dimension to her days. In any case she seemed pleased by my enthusiasm.

Then, gradually, she began pausing more often, growing vaguer in her recollections, repeating the same anecdotes. It was probably just tiredness: she had been talking for more than two hours. I didn’t want to wear out my source. I suggested she have a rest but she pleaded with me to stay a little longer. Her daughter would be arriving soon.

3. This is what is known as an aptronym: when a person’s name seems appropriate to their occupation. You can find a whole list of celebrity aptronyms online, such as the sprinter Usain Bolt, the novelist Francine Prose and the sanitary engineer Thomas Crapper.

9

Valérie was exactly how I’d imagined her. I hadn’t seen any photographs but, listening to Madeleine, I’d conjured up an image in my head which turned out to be close to the reality. She was quite an elegant woman, although I could sense a weariness in her appearance. Then again, her attitude towards me probably influenced my first impression. She was immediately suspicious of me and made no attempt to disguise her feelings. This was understandable: her mother had brought a stranger home and that man was now pestering her with questions. Valérie probably took me for a conman, which is perhaps not that far from an accurate description of a writer.

She asked me again: ‘So you met in the street, and my mother invited you to have tea in her apartment?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you do that often, going into old ladies’ homes?’

‘Allow me to explain. I’m a writer …’

Valérie went over to her mother.

‘Are you all right, Maman?’

‘I’m very well,’ replied Madeleine with a smile of such intensity that it seemed to surprise her daughter.

In an attempt to defuse the tension, I typed my name into a search engine and handed my phone to Valérie. She was able to verify that I wasn’t lying, that I’d already published a number of books, some of which had been quite successful. Taking advantage of this positive new impression, I explained again the reason for my presence. Open-mouthed, she said: ‘A literary project? My mother … a literary project?’

‘Yes.’

‘My mother? A literary project?’

‘I know this is going to sound a little strange, but … I decided to stop the first person I saw in the street … and write about her.’

‘And the first person you met was my mother?’

‘Yes. I just thought that anybody’s life could be fascinating …’

‘I suppose so. But who’s going to be interested in my mother’s stories? I mean, I’m her daughter and even I sometimes switch off when she’s talking.’

‘Believe me, it’ll be good. She told me about your father, your sister … Lagerfeld …’

‘Oh, so what did she say about my sister?’

‘You see, even the way you asked me that … the tension in your voice … makes me think that–’

‘Ah, I see. So your novel is going to dig up family secrets. All the painful stuff.’

‘No, no … I would never write anything you didn’t want me to.’

‘That’s what they all say. I don’t read many contemporary novels, but I can tell that writing is often a way of settling scores.’

‘…’

I didn’t know what to say. She wasn’t wrong. Novels these days sell fewer and fewer copies, and naturally that encourages publishers to seek out controversies and juicy revelations. Was that a temptation for me too? I couldn’t deny that I was hoping my heroine would share a few secrets to keep the reader turning the pages. Beneath my innocent-seeming enthusiasm for a grandmother’s life, I was just a vampire with a thirst for tragedy. Let’s be honest: nobody is interested in happiness.

‘Nothing to say?’ Valérie prompted me.

‘Sorry, I was just thinking … I completely understand how you feel. You think what I’m interested in is pain and sadness. I’m going to be honest with you: I can’t make any guarantees. Your mother has agreed to talk to me and I have to be free to report what she says. But she doesn’t have to tell me everything …’

‘You know perfectly well how this will go. You’ll make her trust you. She’s an old woman, there are things she doesn’t understand …’

‘Why are you saying that?’ Madeleine interrupted coldly.

‘Sorry, Maman. That’s not what I meant. I just want to check what this gentleman’s motivations are.’

‘Again, I understand your reservations,’ I told her. ‘But my intentions are not bad …’

Valérie stared at me in silence before indicating that I should follow her into the kitchen. ‘We’ll be back in a minute,’ she told her mother, who looked slightly shocked at being sidelined from a conversation about her. This must become a common occurrence as you get older: people talk about you as if your own opinion is irrelevant. As I followed Valérie, I thought about the vehement way she’d said ‘There are things she doesn’t understand.’ What did she mean? It was as if she was afraid of something, afraid that her mother might inadvertently bring up subjects that were private or disturbing.

Once we reached the kitchen, she began speaking to me in a low voice. Visibly flustered, she issued a few standard words of warning before explaining that the book I planned to write about her mother would probably be complicated because she was losing her memory. Of course, I thought, everybody’s memories become a little fuzzy as they get older. But Valérie added: ‘She’s in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. It’s still manageable, but I can see it getting worse day by day. She’s forgetting names, parts of her life …’ I hadn’t noticed this at all. For two hours, Madeleine had navigated the waters of her past with perfect clarity. Valérie mentioned that it was possible her mother’s mind had been stimulated by our first meeting, like those opening sessions with a psychiatrist that seem extraordinary: there’s an ecstatic feeling of relief as you let everything out, and then gradually you realise, over time, that you are sinking deeper instead of rising from your rut.

Perhaps Madeleine had been happy to go diving into the depths of her memory, as if to prove to herself that she was a book whose every page she knew by heart.

‘I think my project could only do her good,’ I said to Valérie.

‘I don’t doubt it. And it’s clear that it would be interesting for her to talk to you. But I’m afraid that after a while she’d be confronted with her inability to remember. Do you understand my anxiety? For now, my mother is fine. She doesn’t know she’s getting Alzheimer’s. I just don’t want your project to cause her pain …’

Just then, she suddenly stopped talking, as if overwhelmed by emotion. She had struck me as suspicious, even slightly hostile, but I understood now that she was defending her mother; she was defending her the way an army defends a territory attacked by an enemy, losing a little more of their homeland every day. I smiled at her compassionately, but I felt ashamed of that smile because I knew it was deceptive. The truth was that I was thinking about my book. It’s the same for any writer: the story is all that matters. My project had been to stop the first person I met and write about them, and the first person I’d met was someone who was losing her memory. The irony of this was not lost on me. But I immediately changed my mind; perhaps it would be fascinating to write about a person’s memory as it crumbled and disappeared. I could leave blank pages, write contradictory chapters …

I decided then that I would space out my visits, so as not to exhaust my heroine. I could simply spend time with her, without necessarily pumping her for information. We could take walks in the neighbourhood or go shopping at the supermarket; snatches of ordinary daily life; it might all be of interest. Valérie interrupted my mental ramblings.

‘Of course I think it’s wonderful that you want to write about my mother. I think it’s a bit crazy, but still wonderful. I can see it would be like a gift for my children, but …’

‘But what?’

‘I wanted to suggest something.’

‘Okay. Go ahead.’

‘I imagine that, if you’re writing about my mother, you’ll want to question me too.’

‘Yes, probably.’

‘In that case, you could also write about me. Well, not just about me but my whole family. My husband, my children.’

‘That’s not really how I imagined my–’

‘Your project is to follow a real person, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘But there’s nothing stopping you from broadening the project to take in her family as well. I don’t know if we’d be very interesting, but there would always be things to tell.’

‘That’s true, but–’

‘Listen, I’m suggesting this to help you out. I don’t want to have to tell you to go and find someone else in the street.’

‘…’