- October 21, 2021
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Violaine Huisman’s debut novel, The Book of Mother, tells the story of a 20th- and 21st-century Parisian woman’s life and legacy. Part One is told from the perspective of Violaine, the younger of her two daughters, who is ten when Maman—her beautiful, charismatic, and wildly excessive mother—suffers a breakdown and is hospitalized. Part Two traces the arc of Maman’s, aka Catherine’s, life—from the emotional penury of her hardscrabble, working-class childhood; through her early success (earned through the harshest discipline) as a dancer; to a second marriage that finds her navigating a high-wire act between her life as a woman and the demands of motherhood, while feeling entirely out-of-place amidst the gauche caviar of upper-class Parisian intellectuals; to the betrayals of her third husband, which lead to her undoing. In Part Three, her daughters, now grown women, deal with Maman’s complex legacy.
I lived with the novel’s larger-than-life characters for months while translating Huisman’s winding, revved-up (and at times, improbably comic) Proustian sentences. I heard their voices and felt the shadow of history and the Shoah hanging over them as they breathed the heady air of Paris in the ‘70s and ‘80s, with its boutiques, salons, and swinging night clubs. More recently, I sat down with Violaine, who had returned briefly to New York—her home for the past 20-years—in the midst of an extended sojourn in France, to talk about The Book of Mother. The conversation that follows, over lunch at Café Sabarsky, has been edited and condensed.
There were two moments of genesis. Ten years before the book’s publication in France [in 2018], I wrote my mother’s life story, but as a monologue, using only her voice. It was similar to the voice that I use in the novel for her tirades and harangues—that long, digressive, angry, wild tone.
I showed that manuscript to a publisher who admired it and gave me some suggestions, but I couldn’t find a way to revise it. Then, one year later, my mother died, and it became impossible to revise it. And then, two years after my mother died, I had my first child, and two years later, the second one.
So there was all this time of, literally, gestation. I realized that becoming a mother gave me a completely different perspective on who my mother was. I started understanding the conflict that she had faced, between her womanhood and her motherhood. So that was a huge turning point for me.
Fiction is the imaginative power to give form to the real.
And then, days after coming home from the hospital after giving birth to my younger child, with the baby on my lap, I read 10:04, Ben Lerner’s second novel, and I had this epiphany, which was that in fiction—whether you are writing about your own stories or those of others—facts don’t matter. Facts are only relevant when it comes to history. I realized then that I had to distance myself from facts in order to give shape to my mother’s story, to create a coherent narrative. That’s something that Ben Lerner writes and talks about very beautifully, that fiction is the imaginative power to give form to the real, to make sense of the chaotic nature of living.
Life makes no sense. And the truth is, my mother didn’t know, my father didn’t know, why things happened that way. But fiction has the ability to create logic where there is none, to give coherence and stability to the story in a way that feels very powerful and personal.
And then, when the structure of the novel came to me—its organization in three parts—I knew even before I started writing exactly how it would be laid out. And that’s how I was able to write it.
The poem is real, I really wrote it, though I don’t recall the exact circumstances in which I wrote it. I don’t think it happened the way I describe it in the novel.
In discussing the translation, you were the first one to say to me, what do we do with the poem? And I thought, it’s a child’s poem, how do you fake a child’s voice? Well, it was during the first lockdown, I was home with my daughters all day, my elder daughter was eight at the time, so very close to the age I was when I wrote the poem, and she was in a bilingual [French and English] school. So I presented it as a school assignment, to translate the poem. I love how her translation has this incredible innocence, yet also poise, and rhythm. The first thing she told me was that we needed to make it rhyme, because it rhymes in French.
The word “auto-fiction” was coined in the seventies by a French writer, Serge Dubrovsky. So the word really started in French, But in a way, the form had already existed for centuries. I mean, what do you call Montaigne?
He’s an essayist, but some of the stories he tells are obviously made-up. The notion of the autobiographical novel as a form is as old as the novel itself. And then the novel today is also influenced by photography, by video art, by Instagram, by the presence of the internet, by the multi-faceted versions of self that exist through our presence online and in social media. I don’t use social media.
Yes, I posted one post, when I organized a literary festival, and the producers of the festival insisted that I post something. I’ve never posted anything else.
But what do you call curated stories that you tell about yourself on social media? To say that they are made up is perhaps extreme, but they are narratives. Curating what you tell about your life is a way to start fictionalizing it, in the choice of images and perspective.
And then there is the question of memory. How do you remember, what do you remember, how do you know whether what you remember is actually what happened?
I come from a family of intellectuals, but nobody in my family had published a novel, and certainly not one that addressed part of the family story. And I find it interesting that, when you put it down on the page and publish it, your version becomes the official story. And that’s true whether it’s fiction or memoir, or historical document.
As for the division between myself in the real world and Violaine in the novel, the closest parallel for me is with the feminist video artists of the ‘70s and ‘80s who recorded themselves.
Yes. They are staging themselves as an alter ego in an artistic project, a figure which is obviously not them, but it’s a version of them. In literature you might recall that line from Rimbaud, “Je est un autre.”
Yes, her book [Saxifrage] was published—it was never widely distributed, but it’s still in print. One of the things that moved me the most, when my book came out in France, was that several very important reviews mentioned my mother’s book, and some people at readings or book signings told me that they had bought a copy of her book, too.
Because ultimately the most intensely personal and emotionally powerful intention of my novel was to restore my mother’s place in the world. In the eyes of my family, she was never the literary one. Even though she had published the story of her life in a hybrid form—part prose poem/part memoir/part novel—she was never considered an intellectual, but rather, totally clueless, thoughtless, an uneducated dancer in an intellectual’s family.
And to see her name mentioned with her own book in some of the most important French literary journals, was for me a way to restore her place in society. And then, my book was also a way to make her live again.
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