For Britney | Portrait of young fan on fire

If we had told Louise Chennevière last year that at the age of 32 she was going to write a book in defense of Britney Spears and Nelly Arcan, she would not have believed it. But his late discovery of the work of the Quebec writer, combined with the rediscovery of his youth idol, Britney Spears, through the reading of her memoirs published in 2023, The woman in meignited the fire of writing in Louise Chennevière.

Written in a few weeks, Pour Britneyhis third book (after Like the female dog in 2019 and Mausoleum in 2021) carries the breath of urgency and marked the start of the French literary season this fall. “It came to me from an epiphany of anger,” she explains during our telephone interview. I said to myself that this has to stop, it’s no longer possible. And in fact, it still happens in our world. »

What exactly is it about? The way we destroy young, pretty women who dare to have power, perhaps. Who play “the game within the game”, to paraphrase the language of hockey, but who in fact do not have the right to simply play.

Like Britney Spears, who will embody many fantasies very young that do not belong to her, and that she cannot understand at the beginning. “She learns very quickly to master the codes of this type of desire,” we can read in Pour Britneyand I would like to be able to write that she is right to do so, but since everyone now knows the rest, and it was written that a woman could not innocently play with her own power that she had not asked to have, that a woman could not enjoy it without paying the price. »

In the early 2000s, Britney Spears was the most powerful pop star on the planet and Nelly Arcan had just published her first book, Damnwhich caused quite a stir. Louise Chennevière was then a child who could not yet read Arcan, but who was in adoration of Britney, an artist who filled her with joy. “What I know is that this woman will have been the only one that in all my life I have ever wanted to be,” she writes, in a style where the brutally truncated sentences lead the reader to end them in a story whose sad trajectory we already know.

Of course, we get older and we grow up, our tastes and our interests change, but what struck the author in hindsight was the rejection she felt towards the one she loved so much, when her setbacks arrived. “As a little girl, she really gave me a lot of strength,” she remembers. And I know she gave it to a lot of other little girls, and boys in the gay community. She was a very valuable person, in fact, you have to give her justice for that. Are little boys who are fans of footballers going to start making fun of them or rejoicing at the misfortune that happens to them? The crazy thing is that I didn’t even have a little tenderness for her. »

We all know that Britney, after dominating the pop industry, plunged into a depression which led her to the exceptional decision to be placed under guardianship for 13 years under the domination of her father. “It’s incredible how she was infantilized. This woman is truly a survivor of the patriarchal violence that has been unleashed on her since childhood, in all its forms. She played all the roles: the young virgin, the bad mother, the madwoman…”

In this sense, Louise Chennevière believes that one of her greatest gestures of revolt was to shave her head in front of the paparazzi who were tracking her. But at the time, like many people, the writer had no compassion for Britney.

“I think these are mechanisms that the world puts in place to keep women apart from each other,” she says. I rejected her because I was ashamed, because I didn’t want to be linked to that femininity. Except she always catches up with us. ” In Pour Britneyshe asks forgiveness from the star, but also from the little girl she was who admired her.

Louise Chennevière then quotes Michelle Perrot. “A great historian of women’s history, she says that any woman who emancipates herself is first of all a misogynist, because first of all she rejects other women. We put ourselves at a distance, we tell ourselves that we are not alienated. But I know I’m closer to Britney than to many male writers publishing today. This book was a way for me to stand with them, against what was done to them. This is called sisterhood. »

Because to do nothing to calm her anger, she learned at the same time as she discovered Nelly Arcan, according to her one of the greatest writers of our time, that she committed suicide in 2009. “I have The impression that her suicide was really linked to these issues, that she was a brilliant woman in a woman’s body, that there was something irreconcilable there. It is grotesque and violent. »

Louise Chennevière also wonders why Nelly Arcan appeared to her so late. Because if in Quebec, her legacy is still very strong among authors, in France, she had been a little forgotten, she laments. “Her writing is magnificent, it has depth and a way of understanding the world in a kind of radical lucidity,” underlines the writer. I’m very happy to be able to talk about it in France, because apparently, I relaunched Nelly in bookstores! »

Louise Chennevière will be in signing sessions at the Montreal Book Fair from November 29 to 1^is December, and will participate in the round table Modern witches on November 30 at 3 p.m., as well as at a meeting at the Librairie du Square d’Outremont the same day at 6:30 p.m.

Consult Louise Chennevière’s schedule of activities at the show