Is it because, throughout Pour BritneyLouise Chennevière repeatedly evokes the little girl she was? We can clearly see her features in the naked face of the thirty-year-old – blue eyes framed by pale eyelashes and eyebrows, blonde ponytail above the black leather perfecto – who we meet in a bar Parisian. His words are delivered in a deep voice, interspersed with bursts of youthful laughter. “It’s a funny thing that childhood is, the furthest thing and perhaps the closest”she writes at the very beginning of her third book. This sows disorder in punctuation and commas as he would like to do in the logic of a world which hypersexualizes women's bodies and never ceases to make them pay for it.
This was the fate reserved for Britney Spears, the idol of her 8 years, forgotten and even disowned as a teenager, once the singer became a universal object of mockery after losing control of her life and custody of her sons. for thirteen years. This was also the case of the Quebec writer and former prostitute Nelly Arcan, who committed suicide in 2009, at the age of 36, died “to no longer be able to have been made a woman ».
Reading the Memoirs of one, The Woman in me (JC Lattès, 2023), precipitated a desire for text born during the discovery, the previous summer, of the other's books, Damn, Full et Burqa of chair (Seuil, 2001, 2004 and 2011). Pour Britneywhich could have been called “For Nelly”, “For Louise” or even “For all of us”, as it bases femininity on a sum of shared experiences (although their intensity or degree of brutality varies) , carries an anger that pours out after having boiled for a long time, in a brief torrential jet of implacable force.
Louise Chennevière wrote the first version in “three weeks”. She does not put this duration down to an epiphany, even less to a carefree relationship with creation – “I don't know how to write measuredly, rationally, I use my whole body until I can't do it anymore. » She attributes it rather to the long maturation and accumulation time of ” matter “throughout the events and discussions that nourished her feminism.
Radical lucidity
Readings, too, of course. There is, in Pour Britneyan angry power and a questioning about the place of the female body in public space which at times makes us think of King Kong Theoryby Virginie Despentes (Grasset, 2006), ” obviously “ read, at 20 years old. “It was an absolute shock to discover this freedom of speech which did not concern itself with moral questions. » She read the texts of Judith Butler and Monique Wittig (1935-2003), among others, but, rather than theory, the former philosophy student turned to literature to densify her thinking. She currently knows “a Toni Morrison phase”. Installed in a maid's room “8 square meters »since returning to her native Paris after a three-year stay in Vaucluse, she has been forced to sort “drastic” from his library.
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