Marie Dariesek. “I sacrificed a lot to become a writer, I did what I wanted”

Back Making a wife (1), Marie Dariesek signs a double coming-of-age novel, Rose the Heroine. The sea turnedand Solange that Cleves and D’You have to love men a lot. Or two friends whose coming of age we follow through the 1980s (Mitterra, the fall of Berlin, AIDS, etc.) in a small provincial village, but also in Bordeaux, Paris or London. With as much humor as skill, the author tells about the existence “according to Rose” and “according to Solange”, their connections and affection, differences and misunderstandings, the same events experienced and interpreted differently, their personal structure and what it is. says about what is expected of women and men in general. Meeting.

Madame Figaro: What made you come back to Rose and Solange?

Marie Dariusek: When I was about forty years old, I realized that I no longer wanted or needed to invent new characters. So I pull them out of my Playmobil box to make them live new adventures… With Making a wifeI wanted to write a journey through the late 1980s and early 1990s under the auspices of Kate Moss, who had this line that I love: “The 1990s. I don’t remember.” So it’s a very celebratory but also a very heavy book, especially in the second part, “According to Solange.” I also revisit the AIDS years from my own memories. The vast majority of scenes are inspired by scenes I experienced, but I I wanted to give them a romantic shape, particularly with a rhythm in the sentence that almost matches the rhythm of a nightclub…

Where does this title come from? Making a wife ?

I had it in mind for a long time. It’s not Becoming a Woman, where we hear more Simone de Beauvoir or Gilles Deleuze, if we go that route. “Creating” emphasizes the artificial – we mass-produce – and all the instructions we are made of that keep us going throughout life, from “staying thin” to “kind”, “pure”, “maternal”… made of odds and ends, but we are built into very coercive frameworks. We had to “false” ourselves, get rid of the belief that one day someone will come and save us, get rid of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella.

We are made of odds and ends, but built within a very coercive framework.

Marie Dariesek

A model that Solange rejects, unlike Rose…

Solange knows exactly what’s expected of her, especially when it comes to her motherly instincts. This is also one of the underlying themes of the book. giving birth and being a mother are two different things and this is not about the baby blues or postpartum. Solange never signed for a child, she is an anomaly to him. She only drives for her apple, she wants to be an actress, and she will achieve it no matter what. His will to live is almost frightening. This is not at all what we expect from a woman and this is also what makes her attractive. Rose is a good student. He moves towards marriage despite his misgivings, which we watch with amusement, at least I hope so, and he is more connected to his hometown than Solange, who rejects it. So I found it more interesting to start with Rose, to see how she coped with the expectations and instructions for her part.

They are friends, but they oppose each other on many levels, especially in their relationship with the body…

Solange experiences a bloody, tragic birth, without an epidural, at age fifteen. It’s scary, but it’s the truth, and it feels good to write the truth, too. There was one single mother in my home village and two in college. The daughter of peasants, arriving from Alsace and with her aunt settled in public housing and bourgeois Catholic. an environment where abortion is out of the question. They had a great influence on me. It was totally taboo back then. I had to do some research to see if there were social workers who handled these cases. And it’s crazy to say, but Solange is spoiled. then these young women were left promiscuous. I gave him a teacher, Maider, to push him and help him leave. It was a tribute to me. My parents were avid readers, but Paris was out of their reach. The teachers put it in my head. Leave my village like Solange…

Is there no other program under the novel? : make a person ?

Yes, and to me it’s deviant from Christian, who turns her into an “alcohol” in the face of the burden on the shoulders of boys… Brice, Solange’s night out companion, represents something else. In the 1980s, everything was binary, you could be male or female, straight or gay, possibly bisexual, and that was it. With today’s youth, we are seeing much more transversal behavior. I was a gay club girl, the mascot of a club in Bordeaux I adored called Men’s, which closed down and of which nothing remains today. Bryce is the future of the genre, a guy who is labeled as gay but who doesn’t care about these codes and tries to invent a different way of being.

Can we say that Rose is the one who loves and whose life is already determined in this regard, and Solange who chooses art over love? ?

Yes! Solange is also a metaphor for writing, she could be a writer and she has me. I sacrificed a lot to become a writer, I just did what I wanted. Like all artists, we are driven by something stronger than ourselves… The book also deals with social classes. Rose’s parents are better off, Solange’s are dysfunctional, traumatized by the grief of the death of their first child, a motif we find in all my novels. Social difference is determined by markers like the pool; In the 1980s, there were only two swimming pools in my village on the Basque coast. We have to imagine a microcosm of four hundred inhabitants, where several classes coexisted. This ranged from the estate bourgeoisie, Letitia, in the book, to the porter’s daughter, Delphine, to the middle class, Natalie, including recent immigrants. Of course, since then the coast has become much more honest, the prices have become unaffordable.

Christian, Rose’s lover, also works as a real estate agent, a recurring profession in your work…

It is a romantic profession. agents open spaces where you plan your future life. I have met them a lot for my books. There are real sharks. I remember one of those for whom “everything had to work out” and who loved Paris because people sold there after only five years on average. But there are also saints who want to match places with the right people, people steeped in feng shui and energetic knowledge… And this question of who has the right to live where on this planet is one of my driving forces. extends to the homeless and exiles The sea turned. Agents stand on a kind of fault in space-time, they hold the key to possibilities. They are also people who believe in ghosts, haunted houses, they are often superstitious, which is a goldmine for writers…

(1) make a woman by Marie Darrieussecq, POL, 336 p., €21.