Creating the history of my texts seems as risky to me as creating the history of my life. That being said, I suspect that there is another reason for this reluctance to go back: shining a light on the way in which my books were written is of no use to me for the one I am writing β in front of me, it is still as dark as ever.
When I started writing Cleaned Out, my project was not to uncover all or part of my past life, but just one dimension of it: the transition from a working-class world to a culturally dominant world, thanks to school. I remember that the question of enunciation, I or she, surfaced immediately. Undecided, I drew lots, and not for the first time. Chance decided it would be I , but the fact that I did not try a second time indicates that the dice matched my preference.
There was, however, no doubt that the form would be a novel. I would write the story of twenty-year-old Denise Lesur, who, going through an abortion in her university residence, in the sixties, recalls her childhood and adolescence, up to this event. A very traditional structure.
This is how I now analyze this spontaneous, unconscious choice:. I wrote three books in this belief. I do not question it in the third one, A Frozen Woman , since I accept that the word novel appears on the cover, but this time the I is anonymous, casting more than a shadow of doubt about it referring to the author. Paradoxically, I turned away from the form of the novel with the project of writing about someone other than myself, the project of writing about my father. Not abruptly, in a process that took years a dozen drafts of a novel, one which reached a hundred pages, attests both to my difficulty in abandoning the genre and my writing blocks , where I questioned writing in general, its role and its meaning as a practice [2].
To make my father a character, his life a fictional destiny, seemed to me the continued betrayal of life in literature even if it was no longer a concern of mine to situate myself inside or outside of the latter. Naturally, if he referred to a real person, it had to be the same for I. Any ambiguity would have robbed the book of its purpose. It also means, of course, that I reject belonging to a specific genre, be it novel or even autobiography.
