Melissa Da Costa | “The drama is a real eye-opener”

At 34, Mélissa Da Costa is the best-selling novelist in France, with sales exceeding one million copies in 2023. We met the Parisian writer who is coming to present her new novel, at the Montreal Book Fair, Stand upas well as the comic book adaptation of his bestseller All the blue of the sky and a new edition of his penultimate title, The star maker.

You were responsible for communications before devoting yourself exclusively to writing. But you always wrote…

I started writing from the moment I was taught how to form sentences. It was a game. I felt like I had a magic wand, a superpower; I was giving birth to a reality that did not exist the moment before and where exactly what I decided was happening. I continued to write poems and then the beginnings of novels quite quickly. […] But for me, becoming a writer was like saying, “I’m going to become a rock star, a singer, an actress.” » So I told myself that I was going to keep writing as a passion because it thrills me, but I am going to prepare a real job on the side to eat [rires].

By the time I finished writing my first novel, I was coming back from the othersI tried to drop it off on Amazon. Nothing happened at all, but I continued. I wrote the sequel, Phantom painwhich I also placed on Amazon. Nothing happened either. I continued writing and this time I heard about another platform, monbestseller.com. I filed All the blue of the sky January 25, 2018 and January 1^is April, I signed a publishing contract.

All the blue of the sky has just been published as a comic strip. Did you work on adapting the text?

It really happened in dialogue. I was able to see the boards which were simple sketches at the very beginning, then the drawings throughout the process. But I completely trusted Carbone, who took care of rewriting and scripting it, and Juliette Bertaudière for the drawings.

I preferred to let go and let them both be creative. It wasn’t easy to summarize more than 700 pages into 150 pages of spreads!

In your novels, you explore romantic relationships or quite tragic situations. From the first pages of Stand upan accident occurs and puts a strain on the relationship between Éléonore and François. In All the blue of the skythe main character, Émile, suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s. In The star makeryou evoke the mourning of a child who lost his mother. What inspires you in this kind of story?

What I like is psychology; dissect life paths, trajectories, changes in the psyche. So if I tell a story where everything is going well, nothing happens, there is nothing to say [rires]. Happy people don’t have a story.

The drama is a real eye-opener. In general, it’s an explosion, it reveals and shatters lots of things, it forces you to reposition yourself, to question yourself. That’s what interests me.

In Stand upÉléonore is almost 20 years younger than François, who left his wife for her. Why was it important that she played the role of “the other woman”?

I wanted to talk about the disabled couple. I could in fact have chosen a couple who had been established for several years and were stable. But I wanted the challenge to be bigger. I wanted a couple who ultimately knew each other relatively little, who were just getting started, so who were still in this phase of passion, very focused on eroticism, the carnal, the forbidden which exacerbated all that, so that the accident be even more brutal.

In fact, we go from sexual passion to… nothing. Disability, helplessness. I deliberately chose this type of couple on which no bets were made and which, for everyone, was completely doomed to failure.

It’s a real couple who inspired you, and whom you thank at the end of the novel…

They came to feed me; I already had all my intrigue, Éléonore, François, the world of theater, medical documentation… But as long as we don’t have the testimony of someone who experiences it in their flesh, in their body, it It’s complicated. I wasn’t inspired by this couple’s story because it belongs to them.

Everything that concerns the intimate lives of my characters, I worked on with a medical book, with a sexologist doctor. I didn’t want to ask indiscreet questions. [à ce couple]. But they came to bring me their strength, their light, their love.

How often do readers come to you and ask you to tell their story?

It happens to me more and more often, but I don’t choose what I’m going to write about myself. This is the subject that falls on me and shakes up all other ideas. Stand up happened when I was rereading Phantom painone of my previous works; one member of the couple had had a serious skiing accident, he found himself in a wheelchair and the couple was falling apart. I told myself that there needed to be an entire novel on this subject.

Do you have any other writing projects underway?

I’m nearing the end of a novel which should be published next fall, normally. But it’s not definitively sure that it’s this one because I have another one that has been ready for two years already. Now that my editor has read this one, she’s like, “It needs to come out right now, it’s amazing.” [rires] ! »

Mélissa Da Costa is signing this Saturday and Sunday at the Salon. A major interview is also planned for Sunday, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Visit the Show website for all the details