In 2024, I read extensively hoping for an attractive harvest to put under the tree. I have selected for you life stories with a human focus. Real. If you like love, you will be won over since this feeling encompasses the three books that I suggest you give as gifts.
Let’s start with Almost Virginthe delinquent love of a fifteen-year-old girl, Josée Blanchette, whose senses are awakened in the arms of her philosophy teacher thirty years her senior. I was then struck by Of love and revolution and his ardent love between a journalist, Lucie Pagé and a revolutionary, Jay Naydoo who crossed two continents to come together in their difference and their desire to give birth. We’re not talking about a flash in the pan here, but a high flame, fanned by strong winds. In rotation, their voices rise, revealing the smallest detail of their daily life and are added discoveries as unusual as they are aberrant. In addition to exploring in depth a little-known country, we savor how to heal and live in peace with nature and its secrets.
D.Turcotte & Fils reveals the vibrant life of Dany Turcotte: his family, his childhood, his homosexuality, his plural loves, his life as a comedian in groups, in duos, and abundant anecdotes from behind the scenes of La Petite Séduction and Tout le monde enloquent . Without censorship and with the lightness of the tease that he is, he confides his sorrows, his joys, his disappointments.
Who doesn’t know Josée Blanchette? She is among those enlightened people who are part of our social landscape. The day she launched into fiction with Mon (young) amant français, I had a front-row seat to discover her romantic writing. Today, his biographical story introduced me into his intimacy.
Coming from a bourgeois family, at fifteen years old, Josée is a sassy girl in search of thrills. The forbidden is an aphrodisiac for the teenager who enters CEGEP, a rebellious person is not afraid. The first time she shows up at her antiphilosophy class, she is dressed in a black twill cassock, a cotton surplice set with white lace [ …] and wears her grandmother’s rosary as a necklace. That gives you an idea of his audacity and the upset of his recently defrocked philosophy teacher.
Josée invites us to experience her first emotions with this teacher who is popular for his protest ideas. She begins by fulfilling two duties: getting prescribed the pill and getting deflowered. She now considers herself ready to start her sex life with this teacher.
Their cheeky exchange and his provocative and crude messages will electrify the senses of the teacher, even though he is in a relationship and the father of a boy. This coupling by messaging could have remained at the platonic stage if it were not for the fact that Josée stamps with excitement at the prospect of danger and that the teacher drools with lust in front of this fruit ready to break away from his family tree. The adolescent consents, but is she conscious? At this age, anti can be eaten like mushrooms, in quantity and without regard to their potential mortality. In this energetic story with a spicy style, the author unpacks everything about this incestuous “teacher-student” relationship.
A relevant story
I savored this relevant story which stirs our moral reserves. I must admit, I knew this teacher and, in my case, his contribution was beneficial, but learning of the abominable abuse he perpetrated against this almost virgin fifteen-year-old child shocked me.
It is disorienting to note the divergence of visions between now and that of the early 1980s when the abuse of power is not named, even by Josée Blanchette. She allowed herself to believe that with this abuser she occupied a privileged place (the chosen one), which would appear inconceivable in 2024.
Who was this man; a caregiver for me, an abuser for her? Was she a chosen one or a fallen one? The answer depends on the movement at the source of the self: emotion. One thing is certain, integrity is an untouchable treasure and this frank and raw life story is fertile material for reflection.
I returned to Lucie Pagé, two decades after reading Mon Afrique. I say it without embarrassment, it is my best literary decision of 2024. A single and unique element encompasses this series of numbers: 1 couple, 2 continents, 3 children, 3 decades, and that is love in its most obvious form. more noble. Starting with the stem cell of the adventure, the passionate love of the couple which is refined by watching over three children educated on two continents. How is the equation achievable while aiming for the union of forces? Two prodigious beings respond to it throughout the pages of this diary kept with the rigor of a journalist. This rigor is the founding element and is added to it by their passion deployed to better understand our planet.
It is an experimental love for the uncertainty of the end result. Living for months in Africa and wanting to spend the same number in Quebec with a husband and children, I don’t know anyone who has succeeded in this acrobatics. As this is “never before seen”, we must expect a destabilizing and necessary reading. I jumped from one astonishment to another, overwhelmed and happy to be.
No detail is spared for the reader eager to experience this madness transformed into a project alongside them. The couple confides their beginnings, their marriages, their dreams, their projects, their healings, their missions, their difficulties. The story is told in pairs, each taking turns speaking. I exulted in the power of interest of these twinned visions.
Jay Naidoo is torn by a demanding ambition: to make South Africa fairer and, therefore, more affluent. Her lover will support this vital mission at all levels, trying to reconcile this mission and family imperatives. Conversely, Jay will support his lover who wants to learn everything in order to share everything, respecting his tightly woven fiber as a communicator.
A memorable read
The spotlight is on the couple who must invent themselves at all costs, the healing aspect will take up necessary space during unusual chapters. Medicinal plants, shamans, fasting, yoga, various forms of meditation, everything is involved. I gorged myself on the chapters describing the ways of healing the body and mind. Lucie Pagé is an emotional woman, several illnesses with unknown causes devastate her. She will patiently search to uncover extreme and marginal therapies which, in the end, will work. His scientific inclination will be thwarted, surpassed, rejected. It will open up to the immensity behind the material backdrop.
Jay Naidoo is a man who tends to carry the world on his shoulders which he thinks are very broad. Through his passion for justice, the history of South Africa under the apartheid regime is told to us and to a lesser extent that of India (its antecedents). It is a guided journey, because the exploration and learning are continuous, intense and overwhelming. You don’t visit two countries, you don’t fly over them either, you penetrate them by apprehending them from the inside.
This couple who accomplished the impossible has a lot to share. They are wise people. Not a single line left me indifferent. I appreciated this model of complete openness to others. This book will be among the ten most significant readings of my life in the future.
This book, like Dany Turcotte, is light on the surface and intense in depth. I hear some people find it a bit pretentious to offer themselves a biography during their lifetime and at a young age. It could have been, but as soon as I looked into his active life (comedian group, duo, host, lover, standard bearer for homosexuals), I realized that there was material to share.
From the outset, his welcome to the other leads him to clarify that he was not the king’s fool, in this case Guy A. Lepage, but the guests’ fool. This detail, which is not one, reveals a lot about him. He put himself at the service of the guest, a nuance brought about following certain frustrations with regard to Guy A who, according to Dany T., would hold firmly to his royal crown. In this regard, he still wonders why, at the start of the show, Guy A. announces ses guests instead of nos guests since the whole team works there. After Dany’s sudden departure, the role was transformed into co-host, a change that the main person concerned would have requested during the pandemic where his jokes fell uneasily into a mortuary silence.
Behind the scenes
If you like behind-the-scenes, you will be won over, because the author has a rich background in this direction. His altruism projected him into shows where the group is fundamental, starting with La Petite Séduction for twelve years and with TLMEP for seventeen. As is commonly said, it’s in his DNA. Between his heightened sensitivity and his sometimes sloppy jokes, the emotional balance is not always easy to maintain.
By dint of being in the sights of the cameras, Dany Turcotte somewhat belonged to Quebec. In this book, he confides without censorship and without trying to spare anyone. I felt his relief at finally having control over his creation, something he would have missed. Despite his setbacks, certain wickedness having traumatized him, he continues to trust his audience to address them generously in this biography. It highlights each of his romantic relationships, those of love-friendship are intense. He will deal with the ephemeral more often than not, losing pivotal people one after the other which has created a real vulnerability in him.
The reader will better understand his resignation in the context of the high Sunday mass. Entering the heart of an ultra-sensitive man with a keen sense of derision is often interesting, especially if the person doesn’t let it show in his daily life. This is his first work and the rhythm is catchy, the humor sustained, the words clear.
I hope that my reading suggestions will please you! Happy Holiday Season, dear Radieuses!
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