Weekly Books : You just won the Friday prize. How do you welcome this literary award?
Maureen Desmailles : I didn’t expect to receive this award at all. This is my first novel and I didn’t originally come from a publishing background. For me, the Friday Prize is more of a prize which rewards a career and in children’s literature, it has a very great reputation, so it was absolutely unexpected.
How did you come up with the idea for this book?
I am very interested in issues of gender and sexual orientation. These are themes that really animated me during my film studies and my thesis, so long before I started writing fiction. At the time, I thought it would be interesting to have a story that ignored the gender of the main character. So I made a first attempt at a short story, a “stalking” story. Later, I encountered the “L’Ardeur” collection from Thierry Magnier editions at the Montreuil show, the year Hélène Vignal won the Golden Nugget for Queen Kong (Thierry Magnier). This is where my original idea came back. It’s a bit of a way of pulling the rug out from under all questions of binarism and constraints on heterosexuality. And it also allows us to move the debate onto more emotional questions, which is precisely what mattered most to me.
“I wanted the hero to be able to exist beyond his gender”
Have you encountered any difficulties in thwarting the classic codes of narration? ?
It was a little complicated on the first pages. I had to find the character’s angle, something that happens in all novels, whatever the profile of the hero. I wanted him to be able to exist beyond his genre. In reality, this is already what we do as an author: we don’t necessarily think of a character as a man or a woman when we construct it. I chose to ignore this characteristic as one might ignore eye color or hair size. I also chose a simple past tense conjugation, which allowed me to overcome certain grammatical constraints. I believe that from the moment we decide to make a story that is not heteronormative, we must force ourselves to think beyond binarism. Binarity is heterosexuality.
Does this give the reader more freedom of imagination?
In any case, this requires an effort of collaboration, of cooperation with the reader. When a book is published, it no longer belongs to the author. It becomes the property of those who read it, who seize it and who “poach”, as the saying goes Michel de Certeauwhat interests them in the book.
“As an author, you cannot rely on your fears of not being read”
In 2023, one of the titles from the “L’Ardeur” collectionWay too small by Manu Causse, was banned from sale to minors by the Ministry of the Interior, on the grounds that it constituted “pornographic content”. What do you say to those who don’t look very favorably on the subject of sexuality in books aimed at a children’s audience?
“L’Ardeur” is a collection that takes a critical look at sexualities in the plural. It is not intended to be educational or didactic. Rather, it is intended to give adolescents tools so that they can think about their own wants and desires. And God knows it’s a complicated question at that age! During adolescence, social injunctions are very strong, even as we try to establish ourselves as an individual. Seizing this period of life by addressing sexualities also opens up a whole field of new reflections. There is still a lot of resistance when we approach sexuality aimed at children and even more when we combine this issue with questions of gender, identity, sexual orientation. As an author, you cannot rely on your own fears of not being read, of not being understood, especially in today’s climate. On the contrary, I think we have to fight very hard so that our books continue to exist, especially in a space like that of Thierry Magnier editions. But they must also be able to exist in many other publishing houses which may have more general editorial lines.
Read more: « Censored children’s novel: “We were unable to put forward our arguments”, laments author Manu Causse. »
Speaking of which, what are your future plans?
I published a second book three weeks ago, still published by Thierry Magnier. His name is To candidates and it’s a book about reality TV, which I’m very proud of and which I really enjoyed writing. This is a subject about which there is a lot of moralizing discourse, but very little criticism, particularly in fiction. Right now, I’m working on a third title, so we can say that things are progressing!
“The Hunt” (Thierry Magnier) by Maureen Desmailles
With this first adolescent novel, which achieves the literary feat of never mentioning the gender of the narrator, Maureen Desmailles explores and questions the first steps towards sexuality and desire. As August begins, Max, just 17, struggles with the feeling of being invisible. In the neighboring house, Ellie, the daughter of newcomers, and Cosme, her boyfriend, have come to spend the summer in the countryside. For the first time in a long time, Max feels the intensity of the stares. But how can we love without hurting, without jealousy, without possessing when our relational patterns inherit past models, subject to a society not imagined outside of its binary?
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