Far from the family – a word she often writes, a funny slip of the tongue, without an “m” – that’s where Blandine Rinkel stays as best she can. Far from this fault, therefore, which sucks, cracks, even crushes.
The writer uses as proof all these texts by Maggie Nelson, Nastassja Martin, Édouard Louis, among other authors who are experts in leaps into the void, which she comments on here as a fine scholar and which are like viatics for a life without nets – or at least without too many chains.
Rinkel then remembers, she who is also a musician, her crazy tours and her techno evenings, advocates sea bathing in winter, sets up the surprise, the tangent, the precarious balances, as ramparts against the suffocation of the home – the one where she grew up didn't look all rosy.
Sometimes, the opposition it draws between family and freedom may seem schematic – are there not, also, free and non-normative ways of creating a family? – but the tone of the book, this “everything rather than being encrusted”, prevails, concealing many invigorating virtues.
Ed. Stock, €20. Released January 15.
France
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