One month after becoming director of Julliard Publishing, Vanessa Springora, 47, published this January 2 with another publisher, Grasset, "Le Consentement". This autobiographical burnt tells of her romantic encounter at 13 with the writer Gabriel Matzneff, which will end very badly for her, at 15. Interview.
Your book is not a novel or a simple testimony. Is the right word "story"?
VANESSA SPRINGORA. Yes, an autobiographical literary narrative. I have absolutely nothing romanticized. But writing always goes through the prism of subjectivity and memory.
Have you hesitated over the form this book should take?
Yes, I have been around the subject for a long time. I started in 2014, more like a novel at the time. I wanted to transpose "Lolita", that we hear the voice of the girl and not only that of the man. I wrote two or three chapters and gave up. Then I wrote in the third person, imperfect, with much more distance, and I was not very comfortable. I found that it was dishonest in fact and I resumed at the end of 2016-beginning of 2017 a writing in the first person, in the present, like a newspaper, and there, I went until the end.
Did you experience phases of discouragement while writing it?
I thought that I would not succeed until the last minute, and even when I finished, it took me several months to read it to my companion, my first reader. I did not know if events which dated more than thirty years ago could still meet with an echo. For me, there was an obviously therapeutic dimension. It was a necessity. I'm really surprised at the size it takes now.
You started in 2014. So before the MeToo movement…
My book is part of this movement, but on the other hand, yes, I started long before we talked about the Weinstein affair. But it proves that different voices converge towards the same goal, this liberation of speech. My own approach is included in a whole. I knew that my release would go through literary work. It took a long time for me to find the necessary distance, including becoming a mother and having adolescents around me. I was no longer just the little girl or the teenager.
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You have a son who is going to be 14 years old. Is this mediatization on such a painful subject difficult for him?
Yes, it's complicated. With his father, we protected him a lot. He has the book, but he has been advised not to read it yet. He put it in his library. I would prefer that he wait a year or two. He is exactly the age I was at the time… As it was widely publicized, I hope he will not hear unpleasant things in the schoolyard. But he is very happy, very proud.
Gabriel Matzneff responded to your book by reading a love and farewell letter from you, he said, on a YouTube channel. Have you seen the video?
I forbade myself to watch what was happening on social networks, it is too violent. But that doesn't surprise me. He always made public use of the letters that I wrote to him between 13 and 15 years old in his books, this is nothing new for me. This is part of its manipulation. He always sparked letters from young teenage girls as evidence later. Proof of my consent, of my love. And my love is not in question. I believe that I was very honest in this book: it is someone with whom I fell passionately in love and it took me a long time to understand that his love for him had something sick about it. My own love, I don't question it.
You write that "love has no age", that an extraordinary meeting can occur. If Matzneff had not revealed himself as a sexual predator, would you have more leniency for him?
Yes. I wrote indeed that I could have forgiven her this transgression of falling in love with a 14 year old girl if I had not discovered that I was facing a predator. A love story between a 14 year old girl and a 50 year old man, it can happen, why not. The problem is the systematic and pathological nature of its attraction for adolescents. And the harm it does. These days, I receive messages from young girls from all sides, including many who have crossed his path. They could be 16, they experienced the same thing. Even beyond sexual majority.
What is striking in your book is the indifference of adults. Everyone meets this fifty-something writer with a 14-year-old girl and says nothing…
It was not very difficult to know who Matzneff was at the time. I met him in 1986. We knew him. There was a dysfunction of all the institutions: school, police, hospital ... This is what is staggering in front of an activist of the pedophile cause who has published texts in this sense and who prides himself on it. Everything was already available ... In "Under 16's", there are terrifying quotes. That's why it's very different from a love story. This does not prevent that, in any case, the law could and should have been involved. Today, you might say to a young girl: "No, you don't have the majority yet, wait a bit". It is important that the law is expressed in the construction of the adolescent. It was I who brought the guilt to this story, and not him, because nobody came to tell me in a marked way: "this story, you must not live it". Above all, no one told him.
Bernard Pivot, who had spoken lightly of Matzneff's taste for very young girls in "Apostrophes", publicly apologized ... Did others do it privately?
No. I am quite surprised. More than this hunt for the man who is being set up vis-à-vis Matzneff, an old man in misery who is no longer able to harm anyone, for me, c is the hypocrisy of an entire era that must be questioned. I have had no signal from any of its publishers. I think of Gallimard who publishes his newspaper. And to (Editor's note: Léo Scheer who republished in 2005 "Les Under de sixteen ans" with a new preface by Gabriel Matzneff saying that if he had to rewrite this book, he wouldn't change a comma. In 2013, when he received the Renaudot, no literary journalist, not just one, questioned the merits of this award. The life of an anonymous teenager is nothing compared to the status of a writer.
Could you lead a movement with other victims?
I don't want to be the spokesperson for anything at all. I receive testimonies which overwhelm me. I tell myself that maybe I should have written earlier, it makes me feel a little guilty, I don't know how many years it has been active, I have been told terrible stories in the meantime, much worse than mine , but I cannot be the spokesperson for it. I leave this book as a legacy in front of the work of Gabriel Matzneff and it was very important for me to do it in a literary field, on the same ground as him, that there is a trace from the point of view of girls he talks about in his journal. If other younger people want to go to court, let them do so, or testify, each of them, in their own way, repair a youth trauma. This book is already a trace and an imprint. It will make you think. Publishers, authors, media, everyone.
Should teens read it?
Yes. Except my son, for him, it is different, it is his mother who had a somewhat special sexual initiation… I would prefer that he wait a little. But I would like to have an audience of young readers. Let them read it as a warning. I was bowled over by Adèle Haenel's testimony because she had the strength not to give in to the seduction of this filmmaker with whom she spent a lot of time. She didn't let him go any further. She had this strength to know that there was an anomaly.
Your mother read you. Have relationships calmed down?
Yes. It is the miracle of literature. I had never been able to talk about it with her without it turning into a painful conflict every time. And especially at an impasse. This story made it possible to talk about it in a peaceful way and for it to question its position. For years, she held me solely responsible. There, she realized that she too had been a victim of her community, a young press officer whose friends knew Matzneff, a famous writer who appeared on television and fascinated. He told her he loved me, she trusted him. Having read my book allowed him to ask my forgiveness. It made us both grow a lot.
And now ?
The question is "can we build this new world or not?" There must be equality between everyone, and no longer a system of domination. With Matzneff, we are in a pathology that we have made up under the attire of literature. It is not excusable, to go to sleep with children on the other side of the world, and to glorify it in his books. It is this blindness that must be questioned collectively: why has nothing been done during all these years?