Nathalie Rheims’ life has not been a long, quiet river. The journey has been strewn with pitfalls and trials. After the loss of her brother at only 33 years old, Nathalie Rheims has discovered a heavy family secret which she evokes in her latest novel called Can’t you see I’m burning? published by Léo Scheer. This mystery is the following: between Maurice Rheims and the psychoanalyst Serge, whom she knew throughout her childhood, who is her real father?
The answer to this question has never been given. Not because the main parties concerned did not want to answer it, but because Nathalie Rheims preferred never to know. It was her mother who, one day, announced to her ‘you were conceived in August and, that month, I slept with both of them in Corsica’. In an interview with Sunday newspaper On September 15, the writer admitted to having been afraid of the consequences of what she would have discovered: “My mother suggests that I ask Maurice and Serge to take a paternity test. And then I realize that my whole life is in this sentence, that it is a matter of saving my skin and that I must not know.”
Nathalie Rheims will never know, but she clings to a sentence that Serge told her: “When Serge told me that we were the child of the man who raised us, he was right. The search for biological truth can turn into a terrible trap, I have witnessed it around me.”
Stand up on my own
Among the pillars of Nathalie Rheims’ life, we therefore count Maurice Rheims, Serge but also the men with whom she shared her life. If she was first married to the composer Frédéric Botton, she also fell in love with the director Claude Berri and the publisher Léo Scheer, to whom she was married for a long time before his death, which occurred last May. This absence combined with that of the others forced Nathalie Rheims to approach existence in a new way, she who, from now on, lives only with the memories of all the men she loved: “I lost my last pillar with Leoafter Claude Berri, Maurice and Serge. The time has come for me to stand on my own.“A resolution she is ready to keep until the end.
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