“We ended up divorcing, but our relationship remains very conflicted, not so long ago we were still in court.” Claire, the heroine of Camille Laurens’ new novel, takes stock of the situation in front of Gilles, a man she has just met and who she likes. A few hours later, he becomes his “wonderful love”. But with Gilles as with the husband, it will end up in court, and for one of them, in a wheelchair.
Camille Laurens often finds himself in court, in the media when he is not judicial. Very reserved, restrained, elegant, the writer who arranged to meet at her publishing house, Gallimard, has several times had run-ins with personalities from the literary world. However, she does not exude a conflicting temperament. The letter writer has a teasing face, a calm and hesitant delivery, and a laugh specific to women who recognize the comic and pathetic aspect of things. These days, she is publishing a text that could still land her in trouble. Slippery ground: it tells of the relationship of a writer with a director falling into the category of “narcissistic perverts”.
The expression is used only once in Your Promisebut we see on each page who we are dealing with. Angry, aggressive if he considers himself insufficiently admired, ridiculous in the eyes of those who are open, Gilles has the nerve to ask Claire to promise him the impossible: not to speak of him in one of his
