In April 2022, Julia Deck’s mother suffered a stroke. She is alone, spending several hours on the tiles of her kitchen before being hospitalized. The doctors are not optimistic, but she resists, and the suspended life is organized, from hospitals to establishments for the elderly, multiplying the interventions of each. “ My mother’s death only concerns my mother and me. I don’t want my hand to be held. I don’t want to be distracted. I want to make this crossing alone with her. »
The fading memory
But the patient defies all predictions. Time passes slowly with the patient. This in-between is conducive to remembering a busy life, from English origins, born in an industrial city to the north-east of London, to Parisian life. It’s also remembering these mother-daughter bonds that are not always easy: “ I lived with my mother until I was twenty-two. Most of the time we were alone together. » The stroke has left its mark, the dialogue is laborious: “ it’s like reaching out to a person who is falling over the edge. »
Everything becomes fragile, delicate, sensitive… We wonder what should have been done, if we are still doing the right thing, what worked, what was missed: “ It’s the course of life, a series of accidents that didn’t happen. » Faced with shipwreck, Ann of England is regal, obstinate, courageous: “ she has to relearn everything, starting with language “. It is necessary to try to understand the secret that seems to slip through the twists and turns of fading memory.
A very personal story
This novel can certainly resonate for many of us, presented in a very literary text. By chronicling her mother’s last days, the author recounts her own existence, the role of the father, the misunderstandings but also the happy hours. And the author ends up speaking about herself with distance: “ Her parents live inside her like two giants who prevent her from accessing life. She would like to extract them from her body to grow, works tirelessly and fails each time… “. Faced with silence and life slipping away, how can we not feel urgent? Nothing beats words, the word itself, the breath of a life: “ Despite all the information I have, she remains the most opaque person I know. » Still, the novelist Julia Deck knows how to fit the pieces of the family puzzle.
Fiction is for this, to say the elusive : « For a long time, I had observed that my novels unraveled the past, predicted the future », she writes. Before recalling that its territory is fiction, literature. Perhaps this is where everything can be said, imagined, invented: “ Fiction is a language we both speak fluently. »
Ann from England, by Julia Deck, is published by Seuil
