Usually we find in families, at the bottom of a library drawer or sometimes under the dust of an attic, these old photo albums where the first beats of newborn eyelashes are recorded like treasures.
Here it's a smile, there a grimace, we don't always know the difference;
look, he already had a lot of hair when he was born, and those curly fingers placed on his mother's breast, if that's not adorable... Olivia Maurel grew up without ever knowing those birth photos that we show to children when they are old enough to understand that it is about them younger.
Nor has she seen photos of her mother pregnant with her.
“When I was little,”
she said,
“I always had the impression that something was wrong…”
That's not all.
There was this maternal mirror in which a face was reflected that was not hers: she did not look like her mother.
Which, moreover, was older than the other mothers, those of his friends.
“There was also a certain psychic distance that was present
,” she adds modestly.
Genealogical doubts are answered by a certainty of civil status, administrative information, which, having been written hundreds of times on forms, does not become any less mysterious: Olivia was born in 1991 in Louisville, Kentucky.
Or several thousand kilometers from Florida, where she spent her childhood.
Her mother explained to her that she had given birth there out of nostalgia for a film that she had really liked.
It was a first lie.
There were others, many others: his childhood is full of them.
The pieces of the puzzle no longer fit together...
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