Amélie Nothomb doesn’t do things like everyone else. As proof, the one who recently got into music, but who is still a writer, writes all her books by hand. She doesn’t even know how to use a computer, as she explained on the set of C to You this Tuesday, September 17 (she came to promote her new novel The impossible returnwhere she invites us on a ten-day trip to Japan).
But this has repercussions on his health: “Since I’ve been writing 9 hours a day for 35 years now, my right shoulder is completely destroyed. I went to see a physiotherapist who explained to me that I had to build a very specific muscle here (she pointed to her shoulder, editor’s note) and that to build this muscle, I had to do exercises by pulling on a dishwashing glove (…) Because I do everything by hand. I don’t have a computer, I don’t know how it works.“
Amélie Nothomb anorexic: “I stopped eating”
“But writing literally damages the body?“, Anne-Elisabeth Lemoine then asked herself, with a little astonishment. To which the native of Etterbeek in Belgium responded with humor: “This is a little bit normal! How could I not suffer from an occupational disease?“As a reminder, the writer was anorexic in the past, not this time because of her job, but following sexual violence suffered as a child.
“I stopped eating and it’s terrible to say, but in my case it was a very good idea, it acted like a kind of chemotherapy on what had happened to me. I almost lost my skin, I suffered like a dog, but from the moment I started this machine, the previous problem went away, until it no longer existed. It saved me from that, I was no longer that person to whom this had happened, I was killing her inside me.” she explained in an interview for ELLE magazine.
She also returned to C à Vous on this period of her life, and more specifically on the rape she suffered, emphasizing in particular the fact that mentalities have changed a lot: “We have changed the world.”
Because when she recounted this horrible memory in 2004, in one of her works, she was criticized a lot: “The men were unhappy because I didn’t give enough details, I couldn’t believe it.“Except she recently spoke about it again, and she received a lot of support this time.
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