Two moving books about the search for a father

A father and wins

In Louisiana, in the United States, an island is named after Hélène Gaudy’s father, a land that is about to disappear. Threatened by global warming, oil drilling, erosion, Jean-Charles Island is slowly sinking, and the writer, upon discovering its existence, sees a mysterious message there, something that would have to do with loss, and the need to record traces.

His father has forgotten everything about his childhood, he crosses the ages, imperturbable, without cell phone or bank card, like an antihero without memory. Hélène Gaudy embarks on a poetic investigation to meet this man “with a quiet presence, never questioned”, a painter who piles up canvases, books, incongruous objects in his studio, telling a secret story. The author discovers diaries, exhumes love letters to young women who have disappeared and draws, in this splendid text, the portrait of a sensitive and moving being.

The organic writing of “Archipels”, in the running for the Goncourt, acts on the reader like a spell and embraces the mystery as one hugs a love. Little by little, the relationship between father and daughter changes: they meet and look at each other with a tenderness that crushes the heart. This is the great talent of Hélène Gaudy: to inscribe, in the small gestures, in the tiny movements, all the enigma of life and the depth of the bond which connects us to these strangers who are our parents.

“Archipels”, by Hélène Gaudy (Éditions de l’Olivier, 286 p.).

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A father and passing

“I write about what it’s like to be a girl without a father, about the complex bonds it creates with men. People don’t imagine the bag of knots. » This autobiographical and valiant story gives a small idea. “I am the product of a woman who spent a night with a man almost fifty years ago. » The future mother was 20 years old, the father 17, he disappeared without recognizing the child, the mother erased him even in the words.

At 19, the author provoked her first meeting with this fantasy man. His dream? “Leaving the clan of fatherless girls. Join the band of those who have a name, a lineage, a legitimacy. » It’s at the café. He won’t say anything. No more during the other times, ten in all. Their story unfolds in brief chapters, interspersed with sessions with the shrink, which question the troubled relationships, woven with this man as with the others, between the desire to seduce and the fear of achieving it. One day, her father takes her for a ride: “My breasts against your back on the motorcycle. There’s also my breath bouncing near your neck. » Another time, she is 28 years old and joins him on an island in the Pacific, dreaming of him as a fanciful adventurer. It will be the last. “You built yourself with an imaginary father and you did not want him to turn into a real father,” says the psychologist.

This daring sixth book by Sandrine Roudeix, also a photographer and screenwriter, is a quest for emancipation: “To be a girl without a father is to be pretty to be visible. It’s being intelligent to be audible. It’s being funny to be around. It’s toxic. I don’t want to be that girl anymore. I no longer want to look for proof of my existence in the eyes of others. »

“The Silence of the Ogres”, by Sandrine Roudeix (Calmann-Lévy, 288 p.).

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