In the remarkable
A Dirty Affair
(1), Virginie Linhart returns to the lawsuit brought against her by her mother and her ex-partner in order to have her previous work,
The Maternal Effect,
published in 2020 banned. recounted her youth and her first pregnancy, but also three and even four generations of women – her grandmothers, her mother, herself, and her daughter Lune, born in tragic circumstances, when she had been abandoned pregnant by the father.
A Dirty Business
constitutes an autonomous work, both correlated and of another nature: the story of a trial which poses a fascinating question – Who owns the story?
– and a reflection which is no less on freedom of expression and freedom of creation.
Interview.
To discover
Business with Attitude 2024 Prize: vote for your favorite candidate!
Podcast >
Arnold Schwarzenegger: sex, lies and big muscles
Download the Le Figaro Cuisine app for tasty and authentic recipes
Madame Figaro.- Can we see in this text an appendix to
The Maternal Effect
?
Virginie Linhart.-
I don’t think so.
I think it can be read completely independently.
The Maternal Effect
deals with an intimate event that happened to me young, partly the result of the education I received, partly bad choices on my part and encounters, as always.
But it is also a reflection on the place of women in the 20th century.
I tell myself but I also say what it is like to be descended from oppressed grandmothers, from mothers who in principle had freed themselves from the patriarchy thanks to May 68, to sexual freedom and the revolution of morals but who still remained caught up in many imperatives.
The women of my generation are strong in all of this, but we have had to continue to struggle in our professional lives and in our relationships with men, something that my eldest daughter, who is twenty-five, will no longer have to do, thanks to to #Me Too or even to debates on the question of gender.
Read also Grand Prize for the Heroine Madame Figaro 2024: here is the third selection of books in competition
How would you present this book?
A Dirty Affair
deals with a literary lawsuit which was brought against me before publication of
The Maternal Effect
, which is rare;
generally, it is when the book is already in bookstores that the request for a ban arises.
My mother and my ex-partner had obtained the proofs and considered that it should not be published.
I describe how I prepared my defense, the certificates that had to be found, the text that had to be written for the judge so that she could understand my approach - how I started from the intimate to arrive at a very broader, political, social, historical.
I also recount the trial, from my point of view only, because in law it is not permitted to cite the opposing pleadings.
A Dirty Business
is finally a reflection on autobiography, questioning how the writing of the self can exist without hurting those around them, without putting it on display, and what justice says about it.
The latter is an extraordinary toolbox for writing about the self…
A dirty affair
, by Virginie Linhart DR
What do you mean ?
I found it fascinating to see how over decades of cases, the justice system has thought through so many issues.
So with the right to the passage of time: it hurts less to tell a story twenty years later than six months later, which was my case since I told the facts twenty-two years later.
She considers that depending on whether we can identify the protagonists or not, the case is different – my ex-companion, thus, is not identifiable.
Justice also says that when we talk about parents who, like mine, have been political and activist figures, this does not fall under article 9 on intimacy and invasion of private life.
She looked at biographies of Brigitte Bardot, Picasso and Johnny Hallyday, and it was incredible for me to hear everything she had concluded and which was mobilized by my lawyers to defend a simple thing: “We has the right to write his story, which does not mean that it is the only one that is valuable.”
This is
your
side of the story...
This is
my
version of the story.
Justice does not say that I am right and others are wrong, does not decide who is good and who is bad, what is well or poorly written, what is original and what is not, and not even what is true or not – except in cases of defamation.
She says you have the right to tell your story within certain parameters.
Hence this red banner around my book, “Whose Story Is It?”
which was the guiding thread of my reflection.
And the answer is that it does not belong to a member of the family, nor to a country, because otherwise, it is called totalitarianism, which can absolutely be exercised in a family, where someone 'one can say that he is right, that he has the only truth...
A dirty affair
is a plea for the freedom to write, but with respect for others - since, as my lawyers pointed out, E. , my ex-partner, is not recognizable, and that I also write nice things about my mother.
Also read: Rachida Brakni: “I am transclass, my life is very different from that of my parents”
Two of the pivots of the argument are freedom of expression and freedom of creation. Could you tell us a few words about it?
The idea is that we place creative freedom at the highest level as long as it does not lead to an unbearable intrusion into private life.
For me, who grew up in a family of intellectuals where we loved books, this request for a ban was all the more violent as racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic works are banned... The image that reminded me comes – I’m a historian – it’s that of the Nazis who burn the books that bother them.
To ban a book requires what is called a “pressing social need” which must be demonstrated.
The Maternal Effect
could therefore not be prohibited in this respect.
Freedom of expression in these matters can be understood thanks, for example, to the affair of Françoise Gilot, publishing in 1965 an autobiographical work in which she recounts to what extent Picasso, whose companion she was, was a tyrant who treated people very badly. women with whom he lives.
At the time, he was also the most famous painter in the world... Justice recognized Françoise Gilot's right to publish her autobiography, observing that when one has lived ten years with a man, it is normal that one talk about him.
In what way is
A Dirty Affair
also a literary work, in your opinion?
Well, for example, all the dialogue is made up.
The hundred meter ski fall which ends the book took place but literature intervenes in the setting, the construction and arrangement of the story, the metaphors... A friend told me that he didn't understand why I wanted to write
A Dirty Business
to the extent that everyone knew that
The Maternal Effect
had been published.
Now I think that even though we know this, we remain in a form of suspense, as if it were possible that
The Maternal Effect
would not appear.
And this is where, I find, literature emerges.
We hear a lot that literature of the self is narcissistic, unlike fiction, but for me, it all depends on the way the text is written.
If we situate it in society and the history of women, it becomes something else.
From this point of view, I feel very close to Annie Ernaux when she says she does not write “about” herself but “from” her.
Or Neige Sinno, who in
Triste Tigre
not only tells his intimate story but also anchors it in literature, studies... Writing does not repair but helps to get through.
The Maternal Effect
was a book that I couldn't look at, I couldn't stand being talked to about it, there remained a huge ball of suffering.
Sleep
A Bad Deal
on Paper got me through what had happened to me.
(1)
A dirty affair
, Virginie Linhart, ed.
Flammarion, 224 p., €21.