Fanny Britt: tender spotlight on adolescence

Q Fanny Britt, Hello, my heart is your very first novel aimed at teenagers. Can you tell us the genesis of this new work?

R It’s really a story that came to me at a time when I was having a little difficulty writing. I was very caught up in the kind of global anxiety of the pandemic.

It really made me relive my own tendency towards anxiety. It seems like I felt as helpless and feverish as I did when I was a teenager. […]

Then I also began to accompany my youngest son in an art-studies program, in music. It brought me back a lot to my own memories, when I studied in a school which was also more oriented towards the arts.

It seems like I wanted to dive back into that.

Q The protagonist of your novel, Bernadette, suffers from anxiety. Was it a feeling that was difficult to translate onto paper?

R I didn’t say to myself, “I’m going to write a book about anxiety.” What happened was the character showed up and it was an anxious character.

Anxiety is one aspect of his life, but it is far from his whole life. Bernadette draws inspiration from all kinds of sources: in music, in cinema – when she discovers The Society of Dead Poets — in social interactions, in her thoughts about the books she reads. It’s all part of his portrait.

For me, it was important not to write something didactic. I didn’t want to talk about the pathology of anxiety. I wanted to create a living, three-dimensional character, defined by all kinds of things, including anxiety.

The more I wrote about it, the more I found that the manifestations of anxiety, like panic attacks or obsessions, were very close to the adolescent state. It even acted as a sort of metaphorical vehicle for the character, for this famous transition of adolescence which can happen so abruptly in our bodies and in our heads. A bit like a panic attack that happens, that comes out of nowhere and that you don’t understand. I found it very fertile.

Q In the book, it talks about your first job, the importance of friendship, and the discoveries you make during adolescence. What is your relationship to this unique period?

A It’s a period for which I have a lot of tenderness and affection. We are so on edge when we are teenagers. I feel in a way that we will never be both so close and so far from ourselves.

Far because we don’t understand each other, we don’t know ourselves yet and we have all kinds of areas of our brain that have not yet understood the risks or that understand them too much.

And, at the same time, the loves and passions that we develop during adolescence often never leave us. Cultural objects too.

I’m 47 now. The films, the books, the music that I loved as a teenager occupy an indelible place. […]

I also have the same best friend since the end of elementary school. I lived my entire adolescence and adulthood with her. For me, adolescence is also the source of this friendship.

I have really precious memories of it and, at the same time, I was very unhappy as a teenager. I had a relationship with myself, with my body image, with my self-esteem that was truly terrible.

A whole part of me would never want to go back to adolescence. Then, there is another who has a lot of gratitude towards those years because the things that I discovered and loved, at that age, still nourish me.

Q Do you have the impression that, collectively, we underestimate our teenagers in Quebec?

A Yes, I think there are a good number of adults who despise teen culture, who consider it inferior, super anglicized, not interesting, superficial.

But I’m wary of that because I remember […] that there was a whole part of my world that escaped my parents. Like the kind of language we used between us.

I find it good. When my sons talk to each other, I sometimes don’t understand everything they say, and need to be educated by them. I think that’s in the order of things. What’s boring is when we lose curiosity about their world. […] Which doesn’t mean that, sometimes, I supervise them. Young people must have their own code which only belongs to their generation, but I also believe very strongly in linguistic versatility, in understanding when to speak in a more elevated manner to your teacher, to your future boss, to your grandparents. , etc. […]

The older population has a condescending relationship with adolescent culture and I find that unfortunate. I find that I learn lots of things from them: the way they see the world, the relationships between humans, the culture.

Q There is a lot of talk about parenting in the book. Bernadette really reads through her parents. Like all teenagers?

A Of course not. [rires] There are parents who are more secretive, who put more of a wall between themselves and their teenagers. And, inevitably, there are also teenagers who are less attentive to what is happening in their parents’ lives.

Bernadette is a very anxious character and that often goes hand in hand with a hypersensitive character. […] What I wanted to establish with Bernadette is that she picks up on her mother’s moods, but she doesn’t interpret them in the right way.

She captures them, feels them and is able to describe them well, but she can go completely wrong. It was important for me that she had this kind of somewhat peremptory side that we often have at 14 years old… We’re like: “I know what’s the problem”, “I’m sure he doesn’t ‘like more’, etc.

Q You have several children’s works to your credit, such as the books Louis among the ghosts, Scams or the play 176 steps. As a writer, what do you want to offer this audience?

A I think that every time I write for young people, it is always with a desire to communicate something to them. Not a message, but a small window open to “this is how it is sometimes being human. Maybe you’ll recognize yourself in this, maybe it’ll help you feel less weird or less alone in your situation. […]

It can be confusing not understanding the world around us. I think I’m still trying to make sense a little bit. It’s the same thing in my adult books. It’s just that, in these cases, I will often go towards ethical themes or the dilemma between our comfort and our values ​​or broaden towards the power dynamics between people. […]

I like staying in the gray areas of ordinary life because it fascinates me. I find ordinary life epic.

And maybe even more when I write children’s literature. Children’s lives can seem small to us, but my diaries and the memories I have of my childhood clearly show me: everything is even more intense at that time.

Titre: Hello, my heart

Author: Fanny Britt

Number of pages: 288 pages