The British novelist was the godmother of the Madame Figaro Heroine Grand Prix, which celebrated its 20th anniversary on Thursday, May 30 at the Raphael Hotel, supported by the House of Panerai. She gave a speech paying tribute to all women, real and paper.
“While accepting this award, I would like to take a moment to think about women. Both the women I’ve created over the years by taking on characters, and the woman I’ve built into myself. The performance of the woman who is now standing before you. The first to me is that there was a tragic moment in my life when I rejected an entire category of women. I was a young girl, but I didn’t particularly like being one. Later, as a teenager, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to trade my place with my brothers. Even in my early twenties you could see me insisting to my publisher to include it under the title The wolf smiles, the name is Z.A. Smith, so that I can remain anonymous and thus be freed from the label “woman”. Unfortunately, for my generation, this kind of internalized misogyny was as common as bell-bottom jeans and hoodies.
It’s funny to think how foreign this person is today. But who was this idiot to look down on a woman who creates a loving home for her family and judge that she really isn’t doing much with her life? The same idiot who saw childbirth as a normal activity, or menopause as death, and who saw authors like Natalia Ginzburg or Tony Cade Bambara as juvenile, local, regional, unlike Bellow’s Great American Novels or DeLillo. “Our lives teach us who we are,” wrote Salman Rushdie, and one of the things life has taught us is that I am a woman, not a strange or unusual woman.
Throughout my years as a woman, my female characters have been great friends to me. They replaced my proud ambivalence with the genuine joy the shared experience provides. With Clara, inside The wolf smiles, I discovered the pleasures that youth and beauty can bring. And that’s Kiki, in Beauty, which helped me transition into middle age by showing how a woman can accept her own body or love someone other than herself. Meanwhile, Natalie and Leah enter Those from the Northwest took my individual female existence and reshaped it to be the consequence and outcome of a specific historical moment. Oh how I love my female characters! It was with them that I expressed my awareness of how exciting it was to be woman How radically exciting it is both in body and mind. One thing I notice in particular about my wives is that wherever they dared to go, I followed them. Clara cared about clothes and pleasure long before I did. Kiki had been married for thirty years when I just said yes to my husband. Natalie and Leah were political and social columnists before I dared raise my own voice in these arenas.
But none of them has been a better sister to me than Mrs. Touchet The deception (his latest novel, Editor’s note). Mrs. Touche is old and free. His freedom is of a special kind. The freedoms I enjoy will take another hundred years to achieve, starting with the right to vote. But his spirit is free, fiercely free. Yes, I shall count myself lucky if I grow old like Mrs. Touchet, and even luckier if I learn to be as free as she is, that is, in my mind. When I was little, the role of the “wise old woman” was a fairy-tale character, grotesque, a kind of witch. Once, a long time ago, he scared me. Today, I look forward to being some kind of wizard in life and in my art, and I thank Madame Figaro for supporting my efforts in this direction; Thank you.”
Source: Le Figaro
