Rebecca Ligieri. “I wanted to portray parents missing their child’s inner life.”

Multi-award winning author (Inter Book Award Arcadia, The price of the medicine thirteenth hour Ouest-France Amazing traveler prices If all is not lost through my fault), Emmanuel Bayamack-Tham builds a body of work as powerful as it is original, laced with dazzling energy and invention. It’s impossible to know where his stories of dysfunctional families and shattered childhoods will take you; every page, every sentence is a surprise.

He chose to sign his new novel, Lost Kids Club under her pseudonym Rebecca Ligieri, to whom we already owe such texts Boys of summer. The daughter of two theater legends, Armand and Birke, blonde Miranda seems like a reserved young woman, almost disappointing, as she says. But nothing could be further from the truth… Such is the beginning of this extraordinary and magnificent novel, where a fairy tale tinged with the supernatural turns into a Racine tragedy.

Madame Figaro. – Why did you sign this novel Lighieri and not Bayamack-Tam?
Rebecca Ligieri. – In the books that I publish under my own name, the approach is more poetic. I start with something subtle, an irony, an image, and see where it takes me, while knowing it will be Ligieri when I have the narrative framework, the script, and the romance more implied written in a special way. I constantly hybridize my sentence with formulas and words of other authors. In Ligieri, there may be references to writers (such as Musset or Gombrowicz Lost Children’s Club), but these are implied citations, presented as such, and which do not layer the text. But with my habit of mixing, fluidity, and morphing, my two identities as a writer can become intertwined, especially in this novel.

Here we find one of your favorite themes, family dynamics, this time with an emphasis on the father-daughter relationship…
Yes, but I’m committed to less harmful or toxic parenting.Armand, who takes over the first part of the story, is a loving, present, respectful father, when in my mind the fathers have been abusive, unsuccessful, or irresponsiblestorm, The relationship between Shakespeare and Prospero and Miranda in a kind of insularity, with the absent mother. I wanted to portray parents going through, as is often the case, their child’s inner life, and the character of Miranda, opaque and mysterious, was perfect for that for So, as I often do, I worked on points of view, presenting two versions of the same life. Miranda told her father, then Miranda said to herself, this incomprehensible gap, that love cannot fill it.

Why did you give Miranda powers?
In boys of summer we have Stephen King, and in i am coming there are ghosts, but the supernatural remained embryonic, and the pseudonym Lighieri helped me come to terms with it. I also wanted to reconnect with childhood, this period when we believe in monsters and elves, where we think we can go through the looking glass and reach another world . if things go bad, then I have a shelter, and if there is really too much emotional tension, I will divorce. Lost Children’s Club mixes the world of fairy tales – Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, and Lewis Carroll, Peter Pan’s Lost Children and horror films such as: Exorcist. I put oppressive ogre parents in my pot, a tiny inch, the myth of the changeling (baby switched at birth, editor’s note), an incubus character, but also telepathy, telekinesis, zoomorphism, possession…

I was a big believer in fairy tales as a child and I wanted to bring that joy

Rebecca Ligieri

Are you directing again? monster…
Healthy and new lifestyles and ways of thinking are often invented on the fringes, which then spread to the rest of society Arcadia, I also like these monsters that are at the same time like us and that we meet in Hugo or Shakespeare, and I like that Miranda seems fragile and erased, even though she has abilities that no one suspects : Writing, like reading, is an exercise in empathy, and perhaps that’s why I seek out characters who are so far from me (racist or characters, trans characters, very old characters…) and so the exercise is more interesting.

Your novels follow characters with shattered childhoods who are freed from themselves. But with Miranda, that’s not the case.
My characters free themselves, often through literature, love, or sexuality, but Miranda doesn’t feel the need to, because she’s already led an intense parallel life, and so much without her parents’ knowledge… And she could have had a happy childhood if she hadn’t. what it is.Miranda believes that Alice Liddell, who inspired Lewis Carroll to write Arunning in wonderlandendowed with the same powers as him, that Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and many others in this “club” of children were more richly endowed than others, but also worse equipped.Kurt Cobain wrote in his farewell letter that life is unbearable, how that we are torn between the horror that humanity inspires us and the feelings of pity, compassion, guilt between that which we also feel towards others and what kills Miranda is her. the power of compassion. Knowing that at the very moment when he is in his bed, there are children crying because of the war and animals are being slaughtered under the rubble. He feels the grief of the victims, but also the pleasure of the executioners, and it is equally unbearable. It is from the permanence of his compassion (when most people only sympathize momentarily) that his tortures come.

Miranda’s pain, Armand’s… Is suffering related to writing for you?
I write mostly out of anger or grief. The concern I feel for our children’s generation fueled this novel, as well as the anger I felt at the behavior of those who would have the means to change the situation and who don’t.Miranda says she won’t have a child, but if would have war. I don’t write a thesis novel, but more and more of my novels have a social and contemporary anchor. I think authors are responsible for the metabolism that excites us all. The other driving force is the pleasure of escaping from fixed identities, and in writing, of course, the dominant culture and the popular. the pleasure of mixing culture, Race and candlestick, By Sia, Nerval, and Rihanna, the pleasure of poetry and the hope of evoking aesthetic emotions in others besides myself. We also write with our desires, what amuses us, and the desire to shape and make sense, and to discover beauty, not necessarily a very polymorphic beauty. that canonical, and sometimes completely unexpected, but from beauty.