Emily Fresh. “No one tells us that living together is a big risk.”

Madame Figaro: The title of your novel plays on the portmanteau phrase “living together.” Why is that?
My writing project was born the day after the 2015 attacks. We were constantly subjected to this innovation, as if encouraging us to restore ourselves to each other, to rediscover common values ​​that we would have lost. My idea then was to show the resonance of this living together in an intimate space. Because coexistence is nothing but a division of space…

Your main characters are a man and a woman who love each other and both already have children…
No one tells us that cohabitation (and when everyone comes with their own baggage and children) is a huge risk. It’s like a story in our society that we don’t want to scratch. But when we live with another, we marry everything about him: his things in the hall, his character, but also the brother who comes to drink, and most of all his child. Still, for me, home should be a refuge, not a place of effort. But we realize that living together, with elements that we did not choose, forces us to create. We create outside, inside, suddenly there is no place where we don’t create. The hardest thing about this idea of ​​living together is that you have to “deal with it” everywhere. I wanted to show it.

In the video: the trailer Committed With Benjamin Laverne, by Emily Fresh

Does this mean we should give it up?
In the society we live in, it would be a perfectly acceptable position to refuse anything that would be complicated. However, it probably makes it better to think for someone else (including what he likes every day, what he leaves out in the fridge), to discover a different way of life and therefore an education or culture different from ours every day. . Politically, it’s the same thing, living together would mean agreeing not to be afraid of the other. At home or abroad, we recognize that ultimately the other is a risk worth taking.