French writer Valérie Perrin tells the moving story of a woman who bequeaths to her niece hundreds of audio cassettes on which she recounts her life

Number one in sales for more than a month in France, Tatathe new novel by Valérie Perrin, offers a confusing, fascinating story, where memory rubs shoulders with family secrets, intimate secrets. The French writer, partner of director Claude Lelouch, dives into the heart of a story with many twists and turns, which offers sublime flashbacks to the 80s and the Burgundy of the time.

The French writer Valérie Perrin published “Tata” by Albin Michel.

Photo provided by ALBUN MICHEL

Valérie Perrin offers a book with a complex development, rich in emotions and important existential questions. The story beautifully told in Tata begins in 2010, when the police contact Agnès. He is told that his aunt Colette has just died. Agnès is taken aback: her aunt, a shoemaker by trade, died three years ago.

Agnès is convinced that it is a simple mistake, like a bad classification of files or a homonym. But she must return to Burgundy, to a small town that she left a long time ago, to identify the body of this stranger.

This woman, strangely, left him her last wishes and a pack of audio cassettes on which she tells her story. But what if it’s really Colette, her aunt, who has just died, who is resting in her place in the cemetery?

The L’Isle-Adam swimming pool

In a telephone interview, Valérie Perrin talks about how this novel imposed itself in her life. “I was at the L’Isle-Adam swimming pool, in 2019. I was at the beginning of writing Three. This swimming pool in the Paris region is very important in France, because it was forbidden to Jews from 1942. Claude filmed there,” she says, referring to her husband, the director Claude Lelouch.

“It’s a swimming pool from the 1930s, with a big diving board. I even believe that it was Johnny Weissmuller who inaugurated it. It is a very beautiful art deco swimming pool. We were there, and a child saw his aunt. He yelled: “Auntie!” It upset me.”

Through the eyes of his niece

From there, Valérie Perrin began to imagine her story in her head. “I first knit together the whole story of Tata: she would be a shoemaker, she would be in Gueugnon. I built everything as I went along. I knew that we would tell the story of this woman, this aunt, through the memories and the eyes of her filmmaker niece. It was very important for me to talk about cinema.”

The story of Valérie Perrin is very cinematic… and includes an “audio” component which reinforces the story. “It’s true that in this book, there is a lot of cinema. We imagine listening to it. We imagine seeing it in the cinema. I appeal to all the reader’s senses, to everything they can sense: scent, hearing, sight.

“There are the cinema scenes that Agnès shot. And there is childhood, with all that it means, to come on vacation to a small town in Burgundy, with the smell of the streets, of the swimming pool, of spring.

Dare to speak

“And then, I appeal to the imagination of Colette, this aunt who, as her sole inheritance, left her only niece a hundred audio cassettes on which she recorded her voice, her feelings. Above all, she dared to say, through all the tapes to her niece, what she never dared to say in real life.

We feel that Colette is a woman who never spoke, she adds. “She is a shy, silent woman, who has not had children, who has not had a husband, and who suddenly gives herself over to this tape recorder that her niece left at home when she was a teenager. . And we imagine Colette, in front of this tape recorder, completely giving herself over to her niece.”

Tata

Valérie Perrin

Albin Michel

Environ 635 pages

Valérie Perrin conquered audiences around the world with her first three novels, The forgotten Sundays (13 literary prizes), Change the flower water (Maison de la Presse Prize, Pocket Book Readers’ Prize) and Three (the best-selling book in pocket format in France in 2022).
She was part of the ranking of Figaro literary of the 10 best-selling authors in France in 2019 and 2022.
She is married to director Claude Lelouch, who has just released a new film, Eventually.
She grew up in Gueugnon, a small town in Burgundy featured in the novel.

“Single without children, Colette is the sister of my father, Jean. From the day he left, she mourned her brother. It took up all the space. All its space stunted. Her thin, small body, her big black eyes that devoured her face, her shoemaking, her bed, the air she breathed. She never accepted her death, “because there is nothing to accept,” she said, sweeping the air with the back of her hand.”