lose your memory to understand your femininity

When she talked about her previous Books, Cristina Comencini did not hide what they owed to the events of her personal history. As she explained to “World of Books”, Four loves (Stock, 2020) had a first strictly autobiographical version, before being rewritten in a fictional form which helped it gain distance. After separating from her partner in her fifties, she had the impression of ” to understand “ what happened to him by inventing characters and situations.

Writer and filmmaker, the daughter of Italian director Luigi Comencini (1916-2007) has always trusted fiction to enlighten her life. Hors-champhis new novel, partly reshuffles the cards of the game which is established, in the process of novel creation, between the biographical and the fictional. Based on experiences of“transient global amnesia” which she explains having done four times in her life, Cristina Comencini wonders about what the “is” who lives, speaks and writes owes to the moments lived, “a few minutes it seems”during these episodes during which “we know we are alive, but we don’t know who is alive”. What are the value of these stories experienced by a psychic subject whose consciousness seems to keep few traces? Where do these lives come from that the writer’s mind has conceived as if by stealth?

Mother, friend, daughter or lover

“We usually think that life influences literaturewrites Comencini. What if it was the opposite? » The vague image of a “19th century casserole^e century “what does the novelist retain from her first episode of transient global amnesia, and of which she now decides to write the story, is she foreign to the necessity that she felt, some time later, to divorce her husband? “There is nothing autobiographical [dans cette histoire]she reaffirmsI was not a coquette or even a girl that her father did not recognize.” According to her, “the question is rather: to what extent does the novel currently being written, by drawing on depths unknown to me, modify my life, disrupt it, transform it? “.

Finding, for each of the four episodes of amnesia, a female figure of mother, friend, daughter or even lover, Cristina Comencini travels with the reader to four eras, in four countries, to understand the genealogy of her femininity . In Héloïse, the courtesan whose life is turned upside down by the Paris Commune, as in Sofia, who raises her children during the October Revolution; with Elda, the Friulian worker who joined the Resistance during the winter of 1944-1945 or with Sheila, when she discovered the Swinging London of the 1960s, the novelist explores facets of her personality which still remain obscure to her. “Why did I desperately want to get married and become a mother so young? »she asks herself for example with Sofia, going against the emancipation to which the post-May 68 era seemed to invite her. If they have the power to think – despite us – our contradictions, fictions have above all for the effect of making perceptible what is going on « hors-champ »Cristina Comencini lets us hear. And this, at the very time when we believe ourselves to be an actress or actor in our life.

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