She marked the literary season with her new novel, Stand upinviting the reader to place themselves in the perspective of disability, through the medium of a couple affected by paraplegia. François, hit on his scooter, and Éléonore, his partner, who is told that he will never walk again. An unfiltered story of a second life reshaped by daily difficulties and pain, but also a couple ready to break like a spinal cord.
On the other side, Mélissa Da Costa brings back The Star Maker. Short novel, published in Livre de Pocket in 2022, to support Unicef. The title is dressed for winter as a “Christmas tale”, medium format, by Albin Michel. We are here with Arthur, a little boy whose mother announces one evening that she is being called for a special mission in space. We quickly understand that the « mission » is a disease without remission. A fatal evil, with a name never spoken by adults “with clenched teeth”. The mother will choose to transform it into a poetic tale to tell her child about death, like Saint-Exupéry with his Little Prince.
The physical pain of disability, the acceptance of loss, are the themes that the 34-year-old novelist explores in search of “what remains of us, of our identity” facing these challenges, as she explains to us over the phone.
Values of care and empathy
These values of care and empathy, inherited from a family at the center of which a mother “very attentive, who always puts others before herself”also manifest a thwarted vocation. “Because above all, I have always been a frustrated psychologist”she declares. At school, she only had one idea in mind: to become a psychologist. But his teachers dissuade him. Too brilliant for a path considered without prospects; in a word, she is assured that she “can do better”. She then attacked major business schools, but ended up in communications.
Since then, in eight novels, Mélissa Da Costa has become the best-selling author in France. Only two years after its appearance in the top 10, the annual list published by GFK for Le Figarothis year it would be in the process of supplanting the sales juggernaut, Guillaume Musso. Did she therefore fail in her mission as a caregiver?
“The desire to reveal, to show what we do not want to see”
According to its readers, met at trade shows, no, and quite the contrary. Some grant his books therapeutic virtues. “This book did me as much good as X years of psychotherapy”, “this book was recommended to me by my psychologist, by my general practitioner, by my physiotherapist”, “you should be reimbursed by social security”they tell him. She who thought that fiction only allowed “to escape and have fun”here she is gifted with power “to exorcise” the evils.
All the blue of the skyfor example, whose comic book adaptation has also just been published, allowed certain readers to revisit their “approaching the disease”to become more ” flexible ” with their loved one suffering from Alzheimer's, she continues. “The long inner journey” that his books offer takes the form of a journey that totally transforms his characters.
More “raise public awareness” is a weak intention for Da Costa, who prefers to speak of a “willingness to reveal”. For her, the real evil comes from “shortcuts and prohibitions”. Just like in The Lining (2022), on drugs and toxic sexuality, she expressed the desire to “show what we don’t want to see”. Da Costa writes about and against society's taboos. A rebellious writing, far from the “feel good” label that those who have not read it have attached to it.
