A French Novel

believed life began the moment one left one’s family. Only then did w

family as a place of safety, when in fact it triggers extreme panic.

A family is a group of people who cannot manage to communicate, and yet loudly interrupt each other, irritate each other, compare children’s exam results and the décor of their homes, and scrabble over their parents’ inheritance while the corpses are still warm.

The Great Gatsby, beating ‘against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’.

e excuse not to turn up: too much fear, the fear that they will see right through you, that you will be observed, criticised, confronted with your failings, recognised for what you are, weighed in the balance. The family brings back memories you had erased, rebukes you for your churlish amnesia. The family is a series of duties, a mob of people who knew you much too young, before you had grown up – and the oldest members are well placed to know that you have still not grown up.

François Mauriac, at the beginning of his Mémoires intérieurs

10
WITH FAMILY
I dreamed of being a free electron, but it is impossible to forever cut all ties with one’s roots.

Perhaps what I took for amnesia was merely freedom.

a golden prince with indigo eyes, a boy so perfect in his polo shirt and white Lacoste Bermuda shorts walking towards the beach in slow motion

When I close my eyes, the sea at Guéthary dances beneath my eyelids, and it’s as though I were opening the blue shutters of the old house. I gaze out of that window and tumble into the past; suddenly, I see us again.