Madame Figaro.
– Did you hesitate before launching into this theme?
Nathalie Azoulai
.
–
Yes, because it is vast and very foreign to me.
I didn't feel capable or legitimate.
This world is closed and, yes, I fear that people are not interested in it.
Then, I understood that I had to go there with precisely this lack of confidence.
I don't pass judgment on this digital, but I shed light on it and, after that, it makes its way.
To discover
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What fascinates you most about “
boys who code
”?
Their concentration!
She makes me fantasize, she is lost to me!
They are completely wired, cut off from the world, with this desire to solve all problems, there is surely a very strong libido of the coder!
There is, in this activity, creativity, intelligence, challenge.
Are you haunted by this childhood friend who appears in the book?
He gradually appeared as the first young man in this quest for a masculine world.
Homosexual, Simon had introduced me to this world of men among themselves, he told me a lot, he opened his playgrounds to me. Then he withdrew from the world, he withdrew himself, I miss him.
There was like a specter behind all these young people in the book, and it was Simon who became the real subject... I put myself in the position of a woman who looks at the boys, the men.
The desire to understand how the masculine functions, this desire for machines, toys…
Your daughters say to you
: “Aren’t you tired of writing novels?
" And if we had to do it again ?
I would have liked surgery, I think, to unravel the great mystery, the secret of the body.
Or dancer.
Languages that pass through the body.
I couldn't have been a coder, it's too cold!
This book is autofiction, it's the first time for me.
I wanted to try
narrative nonfiction
, as the Anglo-Saxons say, even if there are fictionalized parts.
It's an experience of otherness, I wanted to confront something further from me, after
The Perfect Girl
(2022), where there was already a confrontation between literature and math.
I also wanted more factual writing, without taking myself seriously, it's a learning comedy in fact.
But I'm getting back to the novel!
I miss its abundant form, its meatier writing.
I like the puzzle, the puzzle of the novel…
Does the writer's solitude exist?
Yes, loneliness is really hard when you're writing.
We envy people who have a full schedule!
But I need this solitude too, otherwise I get lost, I no longer know who I am.
It was motherhood that triggered my desire to write (
with Mother agitated, in 2002, Editor's note
), it opened the floodgates of expression.
As if everyday life wasn't enough.
His private collection
The Princess of Cleves,
by Madame de Lafayette.
“Four centuries later, we still wonder why the character acts the way he does, a mystery…”
Mrs.
Dalloway,
by Virginia Woolf
“One of the most beautiful novels about feminine vitality and the love of life.”
The Metamorphosis,
by Franz Kafka
"A man on his back who can no longer stand up or make himself understood, who loses his humanity... Who hasn't already had this nightmare?"
The Friend,
by Sigrid Nunez
“For the brilliant uncertainty that reigns in the book, is this whole story true or not true?”
Python, SP