It’s the story of a lover, a wife, a writer, a mother, a woman, whatever. Her name is Emma Becker.
She became known five years ago with a novel called “The House”, it was her third book: the story of the two years she had voluntarily spent as a prostitute in a brothel in Berlin.
Last year, Emma Becker published “Odile Summer”, a novel about the sexual biography of two women, published in a collection aptly named “Troublemaker”. And now “Le Mal Joli” appears, a sexual passion between Emma and the man she calls Antonin de Quincy d’Avricourt.
This is the first time that I have interviewed an author in the setting where she sets her novel. The ground floor apartment where Emma and Antonin live out their antics. Besides, it’s him, a very real novel character and writer, who comes to look for me in the paved courtyard, while I was lost.
Write novels
For Totémic, Emma Becker chose a Talking Heads song, « Road to Nowhere “. A title that moves him a lot: “I find it beautiful to be able to say like that with so much enthusiasm and joy that we are all embarked on a path that will lead us absolutely nowhere, and that we don’t really know where we are going. This is where all the adventure lies. The important thing is not what will happen to us in the end, but along the way. That’s what it’s like to be alive and to be able to feel all these emotions that sometimes make you feel like you’re going to lose your mind, that you’re never going to survive it and yet, you always survive it. I tell myself that the lives of all these people on a train going, we don’t really know where, well that deserves to be made into novels. »
The place of sex in his novels
From the beginning in Emma Becker’s books, women’s views on sex have had pride of place. In in The bad pretty story, sometimes day by day, of her sexual passion, then love, for a man. She describes from a hotel room, Boulevard Raspail; “This is a very dangerous moment in our history. But poisoned as I am, I rush in. Why can’t I stop cumming with you? It’s like fucking a girl. She’s the only one image that I found to describe the pleasure that does not stop, multiplies so much that I believed, a few minutes ago, that a crucial nerve had been thought and trapped me in an eternal orgasm until all intelligence dies.”
Talking about female pleasure
In Emma Becker’s novels, there is always this idea of being in the gaze of the other: “I write scenes of devouring because I believe that when you are in love, that’s what you do. We devour each other, we try to appropriate the other and take absolutely everything the other has to give us. For me, it’s also celebrating the reunion of my body and my head. Because for a long time, I made love and sought the company of men for reasons that were completely external to me. My own pleasure was completely overlooked. And suddenly, I began to feel, and for me who am a woman, it always seemed to me an incredible victory over myself, over the way men see it, over what society wanted sexuality to be for us, that is to say a theater scene. And obviously, I want to write about it. It’s not exhibitionism. I take no joy in people seeing what I do in bed. On the other hand, I take great pleasure in saying “Ah, that’s it, I understood, I know how it works and I know that I’m not the only woman to have felt that way”. »
Men often remark to Emma Becker that she likes to write about sex and that desire is the common thread of her novels: “Maybe because things have always been easier for them than for us. For men, it seems incidental, funny and possibly futile to talk about sexuality because we have never explained sexuality to them like we do, as a dark continent, as something complicated to conquer. Women have always been talked to about their sexuality as something very mysterious. I believe that women’s sexuality is absolutely not mysterious. It is even much easier physically than men’s sexuality. But we wanted it to be complicated for us. And when I start to feel, it’s not just talking about my body that feels, it’s talking about my soul which suddenly starts to sing. It sounds silly, but that’s exactly it. It’s all at once, it’s being myself free from everything that has long overloaded my sexuality, my representation of myself and the desire to please. »
Totémic Listen later
Lecture listen 28 min
“To enjoy for a woman is to regain speech”
For Emma Becker, many women walk through this life with the idea that one day, perhaps, pleasure will fall upon them: “As if it didn’t come from us, as if we had to wait for a prince charming who would succeed in making our body speak. I believe that we are our own Prince Charming and that the moment we start feeling is the moment we finally accept being selfish. And it’s very complicated for a woman, especially in sexuality, to be selfish, to think only about her pleasure, not to count the minutes, not to wonder if the man in front of us is getting bored because we’re not taking care of him for example. And to enjoy for a woman is to find her voice again. »
To find out more, listen to the show…
Musical programming
- TROPIC HOTEL – One
- END OF CASH – Thank Goodness
