In her new book, the novelist depicts soulmates separated by illness. A personal and sensitive way to resurrect loved ones who have passed away.
It is a letter to the absent, magnificent and moving, that no chapter interrupts, a monologue matured over decades, seeming to have been written in one go, in a single breath. Incisive pen, but steeped in the sweetness of feelings. As in “Romance”, published by the same publisher (Grasset) in 2022, the one who holds it is called Jeanne, “this first name in which there is ‘I’ and ‘Anne’, doubly me”, admitted to the Anne Goscinny era, born, like her heroine, at the end of the 1960s. The mourning of loved ones, the quest for happiness, faith, Judaism and psychoanalysis of which she was never released, the refusal of reality and its acceptance, all the obsessions of the author, orphaned at 25, are still summoned. The shadow of her beloved father – René Goscinny, whose only child she was… with Asterix – disappeared suddenly when she was 9 years old. And his mother’s fight against cancer which took her away too soon, after a hellish and vain fight.
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To these two ghosts which chronically haunt the work of Anne Goscinny is added a new one of which she had never spoken. No doubt, she admits, because it is “the most painful to exhume”. “Raphaël”, whose real name she will keep silent “out of consideration for her family”, is this uncle that her two children will not know, this chosen brother, this soul mate, the childhood friend with whom she shared her snacks, its keys, its secrets and its sorrows. When she had just lost her mother, he fell into a coma at the age of 25. At the time of the pink Minitel, of “Tchao pantin” at the cinema, where we still spoke in French and where triple therapy did not exist, Raphaël caught AIDS. In the twists and turns of memory and in the footsteps of Anne Goscinny, we gravitate towards the Montparnasse cemetery to bid her a final farewell. We hurry with her while listening to Anne Sylvestre, we linger, like her, to contemplate in a window a drawing by Sempé, the genius with whom her father created “Little Nicolas”.
What becomes of love when death separates the beings who love each other torments the writer
In the corners of Paris, this city that has become her only living landmark, in the words she was unable to say to her parents, to Raphaël and to herself, Anne Goscinny seeks an answer to the question that torments her: What happens to love when death separates those who love each other? Everywhere, she looks for him, in this shadow which reminds her of the face she will never see again, in the vision of a couple falling apart on the terrace of a café. We go back through the streets and the thread of his childhood shortened by mourning and drama. Unlike the previous one, in this new novel, the adult that Anne Goscinny has become does not address the little girl that she was. It’s the opposite. She finished lying to herself and wrote: “I had pretended to be fooled by my process, not literary but of negation. Ghosts are from this world, in the other the memory survives. » Through books and therapy, she came to terms with the idea that those she loved would continue to accompany her, if not in her life, at least in her novels.
“A thousand ways of loving”, by Anne Goscinny, ed. Grasset, 160 pages, 17 euros.
© DR
