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Alice Ferney: "I don't write to judge my characters, but to understand them"

2023-06-02T04:35:39.026Z

Highlights: Alice Ferney's new novel tells the drama of an indicted teacher and questions our society. In Deu x innoce nts, the innocence of a child and that of a wrongly accused woman answer each other. Ferney revisits the psychological thriller in a very personal way to question the nuisance power of suspicion and the functioning of educational and judicial institutions. Interview with the author of La Conversation amoureuse, whose precision and finesse of analysis have never ceased to enchant us.


A vertiginous score about the fabrication of a culprit, Alice Ferney's new novel tells the drama of an indicted teacher. And questions our society.


Within the associative establishment L'Embellie, Claire is a valued teacher, attentive to the well-being of particularly fragile students. Gabriel, a newcomer, blossoms in contact with him. However, the teenager's mother is moved by this closeness and the director of the school decides to satisfy her rather than defend her teacher: an inexorable machine then starts ... In Deu x innoce nts, where the innocence of a child and that of a wrongly accused woman answer each other, Alice Ferney revisits the psychological thriller in a very personal way to question the nuisance power of suspicion and the functioning of educational and judicial institutions. Interview with the author of La Conversation amoureuse, whose precision and finesse of analysis have never ceased to enchant us.

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"I didn't invent a heroine, I tried to understand her"

Mrs. Figaro. – Why did you choose a heroine against the tide, a woman who wants to be ordinary and even old-fashioned in some respects?
Alice Ferney. – Claire, indeed, is not a powerful woman in the social sense of the term. She has no power within the association that employs her, and she is a precarious employee whose social rights are not even respected. Her strength is her marital stability, her motherly love, her faith, her heart, in fact. And she will be attacked in the only place where she is sure of her strength: in her capacity for benevolence towards others. She is a hidden hero, one of those characters from whom we did not expect extraordinary courage or a heroic gesture, and who will prove capable of it... I would add that Two Innocents is inspired by a true story. It was not a question of imagining a novel to tell a moment or create a woman model, but of flattening a case of undeserved suspicion and suffering, a case that struck me, like a pitfall, a limit, insofar as we live in a well-intentioned time, concerned with respect for others and victims.

This book is based entirely on a work and an experience of empathy

Alice Ferney

Here, one, accused, is in fact a victim, precisely...
Yes, and it was something that piqued my interest. How can such a story happen? What does it say about the dangers of the otherwise legitimate attention paid to the integrity of the most vulnerable, women, children and people with disabilities? I did not invent a heroine, I tried to understand her, to put myself in her place, to imagine what she had experienced. This book is based entirely on a work and an experience of empathy: with the one who suspects – the mother –, with the one who is wrongly suspected – the teacher.

Doesn't Two Innocentsalso wonder about the role of the educational institution?
Of course, school as a place of life and formation is one of the subjects of the novel. By reading the work of educational psychologists, I discovered how the quality of the relationship and the affection between teacher and students are an extraordinary driver for learning. However, in France, affection at school is a taboo: the teacher is not there to love his students, but to instruct them. Having suffered from this school herself, my heroine wants to be encouraging and warm, she expresses a tenderness that is reinforced by the fact that her students are in great difficulty and have an increased need for signs of affection. She is convinced of the benefits of her approach, she sees the results every day. Its director, on the contrary, embodies the official line, she does not attach herself to the consequences of her decisions, only to the rules. Claire is therefore initially a kind of powerless rebel, because, despite her modesty, she holds her line...

"I have tightened the course of things as closely as possible to make the reader a witness"

This book is in line with a tradition that is dear to you, that of the psychological novel...
I am interested in what people experience inside, emotions, thoughts and inner metamorphoses. Within this mother-teacher-principal trio that captivated me, the springs are essentially psychological. Two things intrigued me: how and why do we harbor suspicion? How does the one who finds himself wrongly suspected and accused feel? As a child, we are taught that accusing a comrade is serious, we should never forget it. Accusing dirties, wounds, weakens. In the proceedings, the guilty accused is paradoxically less helpless than the innocent accused, because the latter finds it difficult to represent what he is accused of or to believe that it is relevant to defend himself. Claire tells herself that we will see her good faith, that it is enough for her to be herself, that the truth will triumph. However, the truth does not triumph on its own, it is counterintuitive and almost distressing. How to prove that one is not this or that, that a gesture had this or that intention? In this regard, Two Innocents extends a reflection begun in my book The Others: what to answer to others who qualify us, who interpret us?

I don't write to judge my characters, but to understand them

Alice Ferney

" READ ALSO Alice Ferney: "Annie Ernaux never wrote to please and she had the courage to displease"

Did you also have the desire to seize a pattern specific to thrillers, that of the spiral of miscarriage of justice?
In general, I do not consider myself a queen of suspense, on the contrary! A friend had teased me about the first sentence of The Love Conversation – "A couple of future lovers were walking in the street": I immediately said the essentials! He wasn't wrong. I don't like recipes, this obligatory plot – initial situation, triggering event then resolution – annoys me. For this time, I wanted to stick to the events, I was almost absent, forbidding myself any comment or digression. I have tightened up the flow of things as closely as possible to make the reader a witness. He sees how the class works, the spirit in which Clare acts, how others interpret it; Then the triggering of the case, its stakes, its mechanics ... This is a form of investigation, which the investigating judge could have conducted. For the first time, I wrote in the present tense, which gives the text a form of rectitude and immediacy in which I enjoyed working. This simplifies my writing, and maybe that's what makes the reader feel like they're on a kind of narrative slide...

Was it also for you in this book to question justice and the judicial system?
I think of novels in terms of history and subject, that is, the background of meaning and the themes that make us think, which is first and foremost an anecdote. This is how I was led to study the judicial procedure, the investigation, etc. For two years, I read about all the major cases, from that of Outreau to that of the red sweater, via that of Gabrielle Russier, as well as the works of criminal lawyers such as Jean-Yves Moyart or Hervé Temime, which speaks in a shocking way of the loneliness of the accused. They have looked very closely at how the most fatal acts come about, and they have, therefore, a real sense of mitigating circumstances. The habit of rubbing shoulders with immense pain gives them a sweetness towards the human being that the novelist must also have. I don't write to judge my characters, but to understand them. That's what I like about the novel: that we take the time to apprehend, decipher and hear the experiences, the intentions, the feelings that we let pass on a daily basis, because we cannot dwell on them. The famous "cleared life" of which Proust speaks when he describes the art of the novel is also the life of others...

Deux innocents, by Alice Ferney, Éditions Actes Sud, 320 p., 22 €.

Source: lefigaro

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