In a book with a title suggested by Juliette Gréco, The dark side of the queen, and encouraged by this, she probes the oppressive relationship she had with her mother. Twenty years apart, two stories echo each other which speak of the suffering of having known too little his father who called him The Queen of Silence (Medici Prize 2004) and the ordeal of having seen his mother age, loved and admired, but monopolizing and stifling with bad faith, emotional blackmail, plaintive egocentrism.
Marie Nimier and Karl Lagerfeld
As much as Marie is distraught with love for her mother, so beautiful and praised to the skies by others, she exasperates her with her incessant lamentations. This woman who likes to believe herself to be the center of the world knows how to exaggerate the slightest of her pains or to attribute the cause to her daughter who is supposed to distract her from her solitude. Haunted by a recurring nightmare which suggests to her “inappropriate gestures… rampant incest…”, Marie opens up to her mother and questions her, troubled by the feeling that something serious happened in her childhood that someone would have wanted to hide from her, but she comes up against an evasion which crowds out any real conversation: “What are you going to insinuate? Roger was Roger. We’re not going to do it again.”
In Nimier le Médicis, in Dubois le Fémina
We know that this is the wound that underlies this intimate book. Disappointed by her mother’s detachment from the issues facing her, she is no less hurt by the little support she receives from her, unlike her brother, in her desire for university studies or in his plan to write a book about her. Yet this is the same woman who, proud of herself, once took him to exhibitions or to yoga and introduced him to her friends.
Stinging nettles according to Marie Nimier’s tasty recipes
-Going back through her maternal history, Marie observes that her casual behavior has its roots in a childhood where, raped by her stepfather, she found no help from a sublime mother who did not love her. not but which was the one-sided passion of Paul Valéry: “You will have been the biggest defeat of my life”, he wrote to her.
Marie Nimier’s clear writing gives pride of place to lucidity and emotion. It is a writing that vibrates, which says the essential, but where everything is controlled, without overflowing or insistent unpacking. She is herself there, natural, daring, yet modest. Digressing from one subject to another, she reveals herself in her intense desire for a life free of everything that, until then, has prevented her. Repaired?, she asks. This is his last word. But who can answer?
⇒ The Dark Side of the Queen | Story | Marie Nimier | Mercure de France, 260 pp., €22.50, digital €15
EXTRACT
“It’s raining, my throat is tight, tears are in my eyes. I ask her if something serious happened during my childhood, something that I suffered, and that she would have kept hidden until then to protect myself. My mother responds with a detached air. No, nothing. She doesn’t see what I’m referring to.
