“I haven’t stopped crying”: posthumously, she edits her mother’s writings

She had never been able to publish her writings, so her daughter did so. This child, who came to live in the Gers countryside, is Sylvie. After three years of hard work, he was able to publish, posthumously, the news of his mother, Annie Lafage. An approach that she evokes not without emotion, during a meeting at the Barbotan-les-Thermes tourism center, where she lives today.

“My mother died in 2001. She had kept it a secret, no one knew she was writing. She was trying to get published, without success, she was afraid of being scammed.”

It was 20 years later that Annie’s wish came to life, through the tireless efforts of her daughter, Sylvie. “When she died, I found all her books, all her notebooks, her writings, letters that were intended for publishing companies, their returns,” she says, still in mourning.

Long-term work

First, Sylvie, still in the shock of a sudden death, does nothing with her mother’s writings. “I don’t know why, but at first I took it all in and didn’t tell anyone, not even my family,” she recalls. The years pass, and the stories fall asleep, gathering dust. One day, Sylvie talks about it to her aunt, her mother’s favorite sister. “Her first reaction was to tell me she would like to read them.” A sentence that immediately makes sense to Sylvie. “It was my trigger. It was from there that I started reading everything,” explains this native of Aveyron.

His mission: to do what his mother had not had the time to achieve. Long-term work ensues. First, Sylvie must reconstruct the stories, written in manuscript in scrapbooks. “There were loose sheets, sometimes erasures, sometimes impeccable handwriting,” she explains, showing old notebooks still labeled in franc. A single date guides her: January 1996. “It’s the only one I have.”

After this reconstruction work, Sylvie transcribes the stories on her computer. “And IT and I make two,” she laughs. “So it was very complicated for me to do all that alone.” After working with a proofreader, a part of his mother comes back to life, through the short story novel “Les Phar”. “These are completely fictional stories, there is fantasy, fantasy, a realistic story, but everything, absolutely everything, is from her,” explains Sylvie.

“I couldn’t stop crying while reading these stories”

Taking advantage of the various confinements to advance the work, this self-publisher remembers the pain caused by such a project. “Doing it alone was complicated, but it was her secret, so I wanted to preserve it until the end. But I couldn’t stop crying while reading these stories, in my eyes it was wonderful.” A work that pleased, since Sylvie received some laudatory feedback from publishers.

A “wonder” in which Sylvie finds some snippets of her daily life with her mother. “In one story, one of the heroines is a hairdresser, like my mother. In another, the adoptive parents have a ritual on Sunday evening, they watch the series Emergency, and we also watched this series,” she concludes, still moved .