Virginia Linhart. “Writing does not restore, but helps to overcome”

In the remarkable Dirty business (1), Virginie Linhart returns to a lawsuit brought against her by her mother and ex-partner to ban her previous work, maternal influence, Published in 2020. The writer and documentarian told about her youth and her first pregnancy, as well as about three and even four generations of women: grandmothers, mother, herself and her daughter, Lew, who was born under tragic circumstances when she was abandoned pregnant. by his father. Dirty business an autonomous creation, both related and of a different nature; a trial story that begs an interesting question. Who owns the story? – and reflection, no less on freedom of expression and creativity. Interview:

Mrs. Figaro: Can we see an appendix in this text? The maternal effect ?

Virginia Linhart.- I do not believe. I think it can be read completely on its own. The maternal effect refers to an intimate event that happened to me at a young age, partly the result of the education I received, partly the result of bad choices and encounters on my part, as usual. But it is also a reflection on the place of women in the 20th century. I tell myself, but I also tell what was born from oppressed grandmothers, mothers who were fundamentally freed from patriarchy thanks to May 68, sexual freedom and moral revolution, but were still caught in many. imperatives. Women of my generation are strong in all of this, but we have had to continue to struggle in our professional lives and relationships with men, something my oldest daughter, who is twenty-five, will no longer have to do thanks to #MeToo or even gender debates.

How would you introduce this book?

Dirty business deals with a literary lawsuit filed against me prior to publication The maternal effect, which is rare; Generally, when a book is already in bookstores, a ban request arises. My mother and ex-partner had obtained the evidence and felt it should not be published. I describe how I prepared my defense, the certificates that had to be found, the text that had to be written for the judge to understand my approach; , hist. I also present the trial only from my point of view, because the law does not allow me to cite opposing motions. Dirty business finally reflects on autobiography, asking how the self’s writing can exist without harming those around them, without displaying it, and what justice says about it. The latter is an extraordinary tool for writing about yourself…

What do you mean?

I found it interesting to see how the justice system has thought through so many issues over the decades. Thus, with the right of passage of time. telling a story twenty years later is less painful than six months later, which was my case when I told the facts twenty-two years later. He thinks that depending on whether we can identify the characters or not, the case is different: my former companion is therefore not identical. Justice also says that when we’re talking about parents who, like me, have been political and activist figures, that doesn’t come under Article 9 on intimacy and invasion of privacy. He looked at biographies of Brigitte Bardot, Picasso and John Halliday, and it was incredible for me to hear everything he concluded, which was mobilized by my lawyers to defend one simple thing: “We have the right to write his story, which does not mean that it is the only one that is valuable.”

It is your version of history…

It is my version of history. Justice doesn’t say I’m right and others are wrong, it doesn’t decide who’s good and who’s bad, what’s good or bad writing, what’s original and what’s not, or even what’s right or wrong. except for defamation cases. He says you have the right to tell your story within certain parameters. Here’s this red flag around my book, Whose Story Is It? which was the guiding thread of my reflections. And the answer is that it does not belong to a member of the family, nor to the country, because otherwise it is called totalitarianism, which can absolutely be carried out in a family where someone can say that he is right, he has the only truth… Dirty business It is a request for freedom to write, but with respect for others, because, as my lawyers mentioned, my ex-partner E.

Two of the main points of the argument are freedom of expression and creativity. Can you tell us a few words about it?

The idea is that we place creative freedom at the highest level, as long as it does not lead to an intolerable invasion of privacy. For me, who grew up in a family of intellectuals, where we loved books, this request for a ban was even more violent, because racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic works are banned… The image that reminded me comes: historian. it’s the Nazis who burn the books that bother them. Banning a book requires what is called a “pressing social need” to be demonstrated. The maternal effect therefore, could not be prohibited in this regard. The freedom of expression in these matters can be understood thanks, for example, to the romance of Françoise Gillot, publishing an autobiographical work in 1965, in which she tells how Picasso, whose companion she was, was a tyrant who treated people very badly. women with whom he lives. At that time he was also the most famous artist in the world… Justice recognized the right to publish the autobiography of Françoise Gillot, noting that when a person has lived with a man for ten years, it is normal to talk about him.

In what? Dirty business Do you think it is also a literary work?

Well, for example, all the dialogue is made up. The hundred-meter ski fall that ends the book happened, but the literature interferes with the setting, the construction and arrangement of the story, the metaphors… A friend told me that he didn’t understand why I wanted to write. Dirty business as far as everyone knew it The maternal effect appeared. Now I think that even though we know this, we remain in a suspense as if it is possible The maternal effect does not appear. And this is where, I think, literature arises. We hear a lot about “I” literature being narcissistic as opposed to fiction, but for me it all depends on the writing of the text. If we place it in the history of society and women, it becomes something else. From this point of view, I feel very close to Annie Erno when she says that she writes not “about herself” but “from herself”. Or Snow Cino who’s in? Sad tiger not only tells his intimate story, but also anchors in literature, studies… Writing does not repair, but helps to pass. The maternal effect it was a book that I could not look at, could not stand when they talked about it, there remained a huge ball of suffering. Sleep Dirty business on paper made me understand what happened to me.

(1) Dirty business, Virginie Linhart, ed. Flammarion, 224 p., €21.