“The good thing about mothers is that we never get tired of them. talk.” Nearly 20 years later The Queen of Silencedevoted to the failed relationship with her father, the writer Roger Nimier who died when she was five years old in a road accident, the novelist seizes the right side of her ancestry: her mother, in The Dark Side of the Queenpublished on January 2 in Mercure de France. An exceptionally acute story about the ravages of a close and toxic relationship.
The story: This book tells the story of an occupied territory and the desperate desire to liberate it. This territory is that of the existence of Marie Nimier, literally squatted by the omnipresent maternal figure. Nadine, flamboyant wife of the writer Roger Nimier, in turn an advertising editor in the 60s and a radio journalist, blonde beauty from All Paris with endless legs, lively, funny, a devilish tragedian. “One person fabulous” according to some, a diva. However, the reality of the childhood of Marie and her brothers has little to do with the family legend…
How do we build ourselves in contact with such a character? Especially when after the death of her father, little Marie becomes the center of gravity and the pain-killer of this mother who wants “share everything” with her, while neglecting her. Who is this woman who has always been a little too trendy?to unfold his tragic being” handling “painful hyperbole and guilt” of his daughter? How can we redefine a viable boundary with this mother whom she has never called other than by her first name, the perfect avatar of the queen in Snow White? “I don't blame her, no, to blame her would still be to want her. Still hanging in there. The appeasement gestures dictated by reason cost me my nights. They advise me to armor myself, but armoring myself is useless, or I don't armor myself properly.”
There is perhaps at the origin of this text constructed as an investigation a desire to “set the facts straight”. Return to what has been experienced to understand the consequences on one's own journey and its accidents by exploding the lies of a woman who all her life presented herself from the perspective of a loving mother. This work takes the form of a fascinating self-analysis, the narrator endeavoring, through the evocation of certain episodes from her youth, to tirelessly disentangle the truth from the falsehood of maternal rhetoric. From her writing with clinical precision, Marie Nimier reveals a truth whose whole point consists of separating the daughter from the mother to put an end to what she describes as “a perpetual aggravation”. “Cornered, yes, this mother's story is the story of perpetual cornering.”
To support this journey, the novelist exhumes old letters from her childhood, forgotten photos, schoolgirl writings or murderous scraps tracking down the slightest clue, like so much incriminating evidence brought to the reader's attention in this intimate scrapbook. By returning, for example, to the details of “inaugural story” who branded the child with a hot iron. Like the day of her birth when her mother found her “ugly”, nimbly abandons him to the nanny for weeks to go and rest on the banks of Lake Geneva, while his father writes to a friend: “My wife had a daughter yesterday. I immediately drowned her in the Seine so as not to hear any more about her.” Micro-time bombs with devastating effects. “It happens that modesty, humor, witticism, let's call it what you want, have strange repercussions. Twenty-four years later, I will jump off a bridge, heavily dressed.”
But this great reveal also involves the revelation of a secret which could explain, beyond family disenchantment, the deeper unease of the narrator.
From there, something will start to give. “What links us to our parents? A great chain of sentences that spiral around our bodies. If a link gives way and it's the air that grabs us. Nothing is set in stone, nothing.” Little by little, the writer seems to regain power over her story, once the masks have fallen. Her story then expands on other family trajectories, as a way of gaining perspective, leaving maternal house arrest by becoming interested in her grandmother, herself unloving with her own daughter, or in this unknown half-brother whose existence is revealed to her by chance and with whom she will form a saving brotherhood.
There is a sort of Durassian melody in this story woven of wounds linked to an insoluble mother-daughter relationship. An attraction-repulsion totally comparable to that mentioned by Marguerite Duras in The Dam against the Pacific. Except that there remains in Marie Nimier an irrepressible aspiration for light like an invisible thread which keeps her suspended above the void.
“The dark side of the Queen” by Marie Nimier, Mercure de France editions, 253 pages, 22.50 euros.
Extract : “My mother keeps me busy, her lamentations overwhelm me, her bad faith, her blackmail, her aggressiveness disguised as tenderness, her way of turning the world to her disadvantage. I come away from my visits exhausted. I cry often, I have to hard to work. So I try to understand, to keep my head above water, I talk about it to Gilles, my older brother from a first marriage. He feels the maternal complaint as a shield against reality. He says in passing, and I realize that I have never heard it so clearly: To complain is to ask for love in a chronic way, in a nagging way. An absolute love, this love which connects. the child to its mother, the little girl to her mother. You take things too seriously, my aunt writes to me. You need to do a I-don’t-care course! I have to admit, I have huge I-don't-care gaps.” (p.10)
