In “Ann of England,” author Julia Deck describes the hospital care of her mother, who suffered a stroke. Interweaving the daily story of medical worries with her mother’s biography, the writer constructs an intimate investigation into the traces of a family secret.
In Julia Deck’s first novel, “Viviane Elisabeth Fauville” (2012), the narrator observed about her daughter: “Sometimes it seems to me that she is the mother and I am the child.” The role reversal explored in fiction ends up infiltrating reality. In 2022, in the last hours of Covid, Julia Deck “walks through the mirror”: her mother collapses, victim of a stroke.
“It’s here, it’s now”
So dreaded, the object of personal fictions, the possible death of the mother becomes reality. “It is here, it is now”, writes the daughter in the first paragraphs of “Ann of England” (ed. du Seuil). The octogenarian’s vital prognosis is poor, hemiplegia confines her to bed and her words are rare.
Then begins a way of the cross whose parodic stations (the Brico-Ouest hospital, the Charité-Arbitraire) implicitly instruct the trial of French geriatric services. No coincidence in this: the Macron era, introduced on the first page of the story, has its share of responsibility in the managerial ideology of health authorities. Over the course of the consultations, humanity gives way to “elements of language”, like this famous “project” that the author is invited to have regarding the destiny of her mother.
I really wanted it to go beyond the intimate, private question, to raise broader questions about lineage and the management of aging in our societies.
Portrait of an era
Saving what can be saved, such is then the movement of this novel, where the medical journey of her miraculous mother alternates with the biographical story of this cultured woman, from the English working class. A bright child, Ann grew up in a modest environment which reserved for women an essentially domestic role. Her emancipation, she owes it to her love of studies, travel and reading, the great affair of her life. For her, since always, “literature and life inform each other. It is not a choice, but an obvious fact.”
Through the destiny of this woman, a queen without a crown, a broader trajectory is drawn, a period portrait that combines the second half of the 20th century in the feminine, from England to France. Ann loves fashion, cinema, music. She adores Gregory Peck and is passionate about all literature, from Robert Louis Stevenson to Doris Lessing. A love of fiction that she shares with her only daughter, beyond the cultural differences of a mother and a daughter, born on either side of the Channel.
I will never join my mother among the English. I join her in books. Fiction is a language we both speak fluently.
A political and intimate story
Above all, she keeps a diary, an essential source for the story of the era preceding Julia’s birth. But two years are missing: why didn’t the mother keep the notebooks from when she was 16-17? And why, in the eclipses of her aphasia, did she tell a nurse’s assistant that she had “two daughters”? The mystery haunts Julia Deck, who here reconnects in a subterranean way with the spirit of the thrillers that haunt her other novels.
Subtly constructed, constantly worked by the forms of romantic fiction, this story, both political and intimate, explores with great tenderness the dynamics of an emancipation fomented over three generations of which Julia Deck, the youngest, is today the heiress and the historiographer.
Nicolas Julliard/sf
Julia Deck, “Ann of England”, ed. du Seuil, August 2024.
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