“I still have plenty of stories to tell.”

Emmanuelle Pierrot gets off her bike, ties it to a post and signals me to follow her.

“Do you come to the vacant lot often?” she asks me.

I have to tell him it’s the first time. We slip through a gap between a fence and a factory. On the other side lies a vast rocky space streaked with railway tracks. The place is filled with brush, containers and concrete blocks covered in graffiti.

“It’s really special here for the Hochelaga district. People come to walk their dogs, they get together,” the author of the novel explains to me The version that interests no one under a surprisingly strong May sun.

Black boots, torn fishnet stockings, sunglasses, cap: if the look is punk, Emmanuelle Pierrot’s manners are gentle, almost shy.

I admit that I was really looking forward to meeting her. I have said it over and over again to everyone who will listen and even to others: her novel was my favorite of 2023. Set in the Yukon around a band of misfits, the story hit me like a punch in the face. It is raw, brutal, and stunningly realistic.

I’m not the only one who was blown away. The day before I met Emmanuelle Pierrot, the novel was awarded the Prix des libraires. A few weeks later, it won Radio-Canada’s national book fight. It also won the Prix littéraire des collégien.ne.s.

So it was Emmanuelle Pierrot, a little overwhelmed by the media attention, who showed me around her vacant lot.

“I get asked all the time if I’m happy. Are you happy about the success of the book? Are you happy about winning an award? Well, yes, I’m happy. I’m grateful, for real. But that doesn’t mean that, in my life, I’m happy all the time! It’s like people expect a constant euphoria that I’m not able to give them,” she says.

Especially since prices, she says, “that’s not what makes [d’elle] a person of value.”

“Will your girlfriend and kids like you more if you win an award?” she asks. “My dog ​​doesn’t give a damn if I win an award. He just wants me to walk him and pet him.”

It must be said that, for her, this has been going on for months. Book fairs across Canada and as far as Europe, meetings in schools, offers to write for magazines, interviews in the media.

She insists that she is not complaining. “I have the complete freedom to quit whenever I want, I am never obliged to accept the promotion. And they are smart, journalists! “, she said in a sentence I haven’t heard often.

I am all the more grateful that she accepted my invitation.

I wanted to talk to him about inspiration. To be honest, I came to the interview with a thesis that I had heard and that had also crossed my mind: the one that The version that interests no one could constitute, to put it somewhat bluntly, a blip.

The preconception is that Emmanuelle Pierrot would have put her whole life into her first book and that she would have difficulty finding material to write a second. His work would therefore be a kind of stroke of genius impossible to reproduce.

This two-cent theory, dear reader, does not hold water. And that is excellent news.

The first mistake in this is to think that The version that no one cares about tells the author’s misadventures in the Yukon. Yes, Emmanuelle Pierrot lived there. Yes, she was heavily inspired by what she saw there. But Emmanuelle is not Sacha, the novel’s protagonist. Nor is each character based on a real person.

I realize that I took the novel much too literally, a mistake which does not displease the author.

“The goal was to go into reality. It’s realism. If people think it’s true, it’s because it’s successful and the editorial process worked,” she says with a small, satisfied smile.

It is by speaking to Emmanuelle Pierrot that we understand to what extent her novel has been thought out. Her writing comes from an “irrepressible impulse”, the author being able to write up to 12 hours a day when she gets going. But subsequently, this raw material has been questioned, reworked.

The dramatic tension, for example, has been carefully measured so that we don’t really know whether the main character is delirious when he feels rejected or whether there is actually a mass movement against him.

“The first drafts were toned down to keep the reader in this paranoia as long as possible,” she explains.

As for the feminist message, she didn’t necessarily think about it when she wrote.

“Political analysis came after, not before.”

Don’t think that Emmanuelle Pierrot wrote this book by chance. She has been writing since she was 15 and says she couldn’t live any other way.

“Writing came a bit from nihilism,” she continues. It’s a way of knowing what I’m going to do before I die, because nothing makes sense anyway. »

She has always shared her writings at parties or in “underground zines”.

“The ambition to publish is more recent. Now, you are less in nihilism, you are trying to have recognition from institutions. It happened around the age of 26-27,” she says.

Emmanuelle Pierrot is therefore far from worrying about inspiration. She is also working on a manuscript started before The version that interests no one.

“Making a book is like trying to make a baby, you never know if something will come of it. I hope to be able to make a novel with it, but we’ll see!” she says.

After the madness of promoting The version that interests no oneshe is also eager to get back into it seriously. She also says she has a “big sports bag full of travel journals” in which she could draw inspiration – or not.

“That’s my fun in life, telling stories,” she sums up. “And I still have plenty more to tell.”