Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  But this was the first time I’d received an anonymous letter at my home address. And the first time I’d received such an angry letter about one of my books.

  I’d only just finished reading it when my mobile rang. I didn’t know the number that came up and I hesitated before answering. For an instant, I thought it might be the person who had written the letter, even though that made no sense. I was so disturbed (and relieved) that it didn’t strike me as strange to hear L.’s low, slightly muffled voice, though I hadn’t given her my number.

  L. had thought about me often since we met, she said, and suggested we went for a cup of tea or coffee, or a glass of wine, or any drink I liked, some day that suited me. She realised her suggestion might strike me as strange, a little forward. She laughed, then added, ‘But the future belongs to the sentimental.’

  I didn’t know what to say. The image of the Sentimental Wolf came to mind, a picture book that I’d read dozens of times to the children when they were little, in which the hero, Lucas, a smart young wolf, leaves his family to make his own life. When it’s time to say goodbye, his emotional father lists the things he can eat: Little Red Riding Hood, three little pigs, goats and kids, etc. Dressed in Bermuda shorts and a roll-neck sweater (I mention these details as they add to the character’s undeniable charm), Lucas sets off on his adventures, eager and confident. But every time he comes across one of the prey on his list, he lets himself be sweet-talked and instead of eating them all up, he goes on his way. Having let go several four-legged feasts – with whom he strikes up friendly relations – a famished Lucas meets the terrible ogre (in my memory he’s the ogre from Tom Thumb) and swallows him whole, or almost, thereby delivering all the vulnerable creatures of the neighbourhood from this threat.

  In truth, apart from this tale, no example of the good fortune of the sentimental came to mind. It seemed to me, on the contrary, that most of the time the sentimental were the favourite prey of the wicked and the despotic.

  Be that as it may, I heard myself say, Yes, why not, that would be nice, or something of the sort. We agreed to meet the following Friday in a café L. knew. In the course of the conversation, she asked me several times if everything was OK, as though, from where she was, she could tell I was upset.

  Later, when I asked how she got my phone number, L. told me that she had enough contacts to get anyone’s mobile number.

  7

  I found a note of this first appointment in my diary. Beside L.’s name I’d marked her phone number and the address of the café. At that time, and for a while longer, I could still hold a pen, and my life was contained in that black diary, the same Quo Vadis brand I had purchased new every autumn for the last fifteen years. With the help of its pages, I’m trying to imagine the state of mind I was in when I saw L. again, to reconstruct the context. In that same week, I apparently took part in an event in a Paris bookshop, and met Lutetia, a researcher at the National Centre for Scientific Research, who was working on a study of how writers are portrayed in the media. I went to 12 rue Édouard-Lockroy (the address is highlighted in green marker, though there’s no clue as to why). I ate at Pachyderme with Serge, whom I see a couple of times a year to catch up on life and work (that day we talked about the hunt for the ideal chair and Serge gave a hilarious account of his passing infatuation with one seat after another, and the rejected chairs piling up on his landing). In addition to these meetings, there were about ten others that I only vaguely recollect. From this I conclude that it was a busy time. I was probably a bit tense, as I am when life runs away from me, gallops ahead. I note, too, that I had begun my English lessons with Simon. I had just had one of these when I met L. at the Express Bar.

  I didn’t know much about her, as we’d mainly talked about me the first time we met. When I got home, that realisation had left me uneasy. That’s why, as soon as I sat down, I launched in to several questions without giving her time to change the direction of the conversation. It hadn’t escaped my attention that she was used to leading the dance.

  L. smiled, like a good sport.

  First she explained that her profession was writing for other people. She wrote their confessions, their states of mind, their exceptional lives, which only needed setting down, or, more rarely, their untroubled progress, which needed to be transformed into an epic. A few years ago, having previously been a journalist, she’d made this kind of writing her career. L. was much in demand from publishers and even had the luxury of turning down commissions. Over time, she’d become a bit of a specialist in women’s autobiography; actresses, singers and female politicians fought over her. L. explained how the market worked: most of the big jobs were shared among three or four writers. Most of the time she’d be competing with a couple of well-known authors who, in addition to their own writing, also worked as ghosts. ‘Star ghosts’, to be precise, an invisible literary species to which she reckoned she belonged. Neither their names nor hers appeared on the cover; at most it might feature on the title page as a ‘collaboration’. But in truth most of the time nothing outside or inside the book gave any clue that the supposed author might not have written a single word. She reeled off the titles of her most recent works, among which were the memoirs of a top international model and the story of a young woman who’d been held captive for several years. Then L. told me about the hours she spent interviewing these people to gather the material, how long it took to tame them, the bond that gradually formed, cautiously at first, then increasingly intense and trusting. She considered them her ‘patients’; clearly she didn’t mean it absolutely literally, but neither was the word chosen at random, because what she listened to were their torments, their contradictions, their innermost thoughts. Some of them even felt the need for her not to look at them or had to talk to her lying down. Most of the time she went to their homes; she took out her dictaphone and her mobile (once she’d lost a whole session; the recorder stopped working during the interview without her realising, and since then she’d backed everything up with a second recording) and let the words and the memories start to flow. She’d spent the previous summer in Ibiza, living in the home of a famous TV presenter for several weeks. She’d adopted her rhythm, met her friends, blended into the background. Gradually, the confidences had started to come, over breakfast, or during a night-time stroll, or in an empty house the morning after a party. L. had recorded everything, hours of bland exchanges during which a revelation would sometimes crop up. She’d just finished the book, after spending a few months on it. L. liked mentioning this material she was given: living, raw material, which had something at its heart that contained the Real. She uttered that word several times, because ultimately only the Real mattered. And all this came from the encounter, from the particular relationship that gradually formed between her and them. She found it hard to finish one book and begin another. Every time she felt guilty: guilty of abandonment, like a fickle, indecisive lover, who breaks things off before she gets bored.

  Later that evening, L. told me she lived alone; her husband had been dead a long time. I didn’t ask how; I felt that this piece of information contained additional pain that L. wasn’t ready to talk about yet. She told me she hadn’t had children, but it wasn’t a regret, or rather it was a regret she couldn’t acknowledge, a regret that she’d distanced herself from, like a poison. Did there have to be reasons and justifications? It simply hadn’t happened. I realised at that moment that I couldn’t have said how old she was; L. could just as easily have been thirty-five as forty-five. She was one of those girls who looks like a woman before her contemporaries and one of those women who remains forever a girl. L. asked if I lived with François (I remember she used his first name) and I explained why we’d decided to keep our own places while we had children living with us. Yes, I probably was afraid of habit, erosion, irritation, compromises, all sorts of really banal things that happen to people who love each other after they’ve lived together for a few years, but above all I was scared of upsetting the balance we had.
Also, at our age, when we all have our burden of defeats and disillusionments, it seemed to me that by living like this, we gave and received the best of ourselves.

  I like the easy exchange you experience with some people, that way of getting to the heart of a subject immediately. I like talking about the essential, emotional things, even with friends I see only a couple of times a year. I like the ability in other people (often women) to talk intimately without going too far.

  So there we sat opposite each other in the café, L. no longer in that attitude of seduction I’d seen at the party, or slightly on the offensive. Something about her seemed gentler. We were two women getting to know each other, who shared a certain number of preoccupations and immediately sensed affinities that linked them. That always strikes me as both banal and miraculous. The conversation switched to lighter things. I remember L. quite quickly got me talking about my female friends. Who were they? Where were they from? How often was I in touch with them? This is a subject I like and can talk about for hours. I have friends from nursery, primary and secondary school, my foundation course, everywhere I have been. I’ve made friends in the different companies I’ve worked for and have two from festivals or book fairs. It’s undeniable that I’m someone who forms attachments, and attachments that last. Some of my friends left Paris long ago, others have returned. I’ve also made new ones. I admire them all for different reasons. I need to know what becomes of them, what they’re experiencing, what moves them, even if our lives are very busy. I also like my friends to meet each other, and some of them have formed their own friendships, which are now quite independent of me.

  I was trying to explain this to L. and how much each of them, unique and singular, meant to me, when she asked, ‘But none of them call you every day? None of them share your daily life?’

  No, none of them were so constantly present. It seemed to me that that’s how things went. Over time, our relationships had evolved. We might see each other less often, but it was no less intense. We had our own lives. And we always met with the greatest ease; that was true of all of these friendships, the oldest as well as the most recent. The ability we had to be instantly intimate, despite not having seen each other for weeks or even months, never ceased to amaze me. My closest friendships had turned into a looser, less exclusive link, soluble in a life made up of other ties.

  L. seemed surprised. She regarded it as impossible for an adult to have several friends. Several true friends. She wasn’t talking about girlfriends, but the person with whom you could share everything. Uniquely. The person who could listen to everything, understand everything, without judging. I told her that I had several such friends. Each of these relationships had its own tonality, its rhythm and frequency, its favourite subjects and its taboos. My friends were all different from each other and I shared different things with them. Each of them was important to me in a unique way. L. wanted to know more about them. What were their names? What jobs did they do? Were they single or living with someone? Did they have children?

  In trying to reconstruct this conversation today, I’m tempted to think that L. was testing the ground, assessing her chances of conquest. But in reality I’m not sure whether things were that clear. L. had a genuine curiosity, a deep and fresh interest that I had no reason to mistrust.

  People who ask real questions, the ones that matter, are rare.

  It had got dark and the waitress had lit candles on every table. I texted the children to let them know that I’d be a bit late and told them not to wait for me to eat.

  It was all so simple.

  Later, when I took a pen from my bag to jot something down on a piece of paper, probably an address or the name of a shop, L. smiled at me.

  ‘I’m left-handed too. You know that left-handers can recognise one another?’

  L. didn’t talk about my book or my forthcoming work that day.

  L. was advancing ever so softly. She had all the time in the world.

  8

  At the time I met L., I was thinking about writing a novel that would have as its setting, or starting point, a reality TV show. I’d been mulling the idea over for ages and in the past ten years had amassed a lot of material. In 2001, a few months before the popular Loft Story was broadcast, I’d watched a programme on TF6 whose premise fascinated me (it seems very staid compared to what exists now): three teams of young contestants were locked up in three different empty apartments. These participants had to complete a number of tasks that determined how long they could spend on the internet ordering furniture and food. For the first time in France, people were filmed twenty-four hours a day on multiple cameras. As far as I know, Net Adventures was France’s first reality TV show. By some coincidence – I think he was the friend of a friend’s son or something – I met one of the contestants. He described what he had gone through when he left the apartment. Back then, what interested me was how young people returned to real life after being shut away for several weeks. I sensed we were on the verge of a television revolution, but I had no idea of its scale. Then Loft Story burst on to the scene and for a few months it was all people talked about. I don’t think I missed a single episode of the first prime-time season, and that devotion finally got the better of my desire to write.

  A few years later, as reality TV further extended the boundaries of vacuousness and voyeurism, my fascination shifted. Beyond the participants and their psychological future, I was interested in how these programmes managed to shape characters, to make them experience largely scripted relationships or situations (or created them in the edit), while giving the viewer the illusion of reality. How did these alliances, tensions, conflicts – fabricated and orchestrated by invisible creators – corroborate the appearance of the Real?

  Through a friend, I managed to contact a producer who had worked on several consecutive seasons of a major reality show. She’d left the production company and I was hoping she’d feel free to recount a few anecdotes. On the phone she seemed quite favourably disposed and admitted straight off, ‘Of course we create characters! But the best thing is that we create them without the people who play them knowing.’

  At the time when I met L., I’d been filling notebooks for a while for a novel that would deal with this issue or would be underpinned by it. I was looking for material. I almost always worked like this: first research, then writing (which is, of course, a form of research by other means). I would have an immersion, impregnation phase, during which I’d assemble my arsenal. In this documentation phase, I’d keep an especially close eye on my impulse: the impulse that gave me the desire to invent, to compose, that led me each morning to the Word file, which I soon became obsessive about saving.

  It was all about the spark, the click. Then came the writing: months of solitude in front of the screen, hand-to-hand combat, during which persistence alone would pay off.

  I wouldn’t be able to find the time and mental space necessary to get down to work for a few weeks. Louise and Paul were both about to take their baccalaureate and I wanted to be there for them, to make myself completely available. I’d planned to begin the new book after the summer, when everyone went back to work and autumn was in the air.

  Of course, I sensed it wouldn’t be that simple. I had to recover my groove, the imperceptible markers of my path, the invisible thread spun from one text to another that you think you hold but which keeps slipping from your grasp. I would have to put everything I’d heard and absorbed aside, everything that had been said or written, my doubts and fears. I knew all that. And all that from now on was part of an equation with several unknowns to which I had to submit. At least I knew the first line of the solution: I had to recreate silence, withdraw, reconstruct the bubble.

  I had a few weeks ahead of me. I was no longer so busy or tired. I spent time at home with the children. I went to see François when I could, or he came to me. Things followed their course. I felt I occupied an in-between zone: one of those transitional, vaguely expectant phases that mark the end of on
e period and make way for the next. One of those times when, to avoid a short circuit, you take care that events do not overlap or collide, and you complete what needs to be completed.

  I couldn’t wait to go into purdah.

  Judging by my diary, I saw L. several times during this period. I don’t remember exactly how we got in touch. I imagine that after the evening in the Express Bar, one of us called the other. I think L. may have sent me the addresses of a couple of places we’d talked about. She invited me to go and see a play that had been sold out for weeks that I hadn’t managed to get tickets for. Another time, I remember we had coffee in a bar on rue Servan; she’d called me from the street straight after an appointment in my neighbourhood. By various means, L. had signalled her desire that our relations should extend beyond these first meetings.

  In early May, L. suggested going to the cinema. Shortly before, I’d told her how much I loved going to see films in the middle of the afternoon – a student pleasure I’d been enjoying since leaving my former company – and the transgressive experience of sitting in the dark for two hours, away from my desk. I liked going to the cinema with other people and talking about the film afterwards, in that rather vague, sometimes emotional state just after seeing it. But I also liked going alone, so that nothing alters those first impressions, nothing disturbs the possibility of your whole body feeling like a sounding board. When the lights come up and the credits roll, being alone prolongs the moment, stretches it out, of staying seated in the atmosphere of the film, completely absorbed by its mood. We had this conversation one of the first times we went out together. L. told me she couldn’t bear going to the cinema alone: she was convinced that everyone was looking at her. So that was why she asked me to go with her to see Delphine and Muriel Coulin’s first feature film, 17 Girls. The film had come out just before Christmas but she hadn’t been able to go because of an urgent deadline. It was still showing for a few days in a cinema in the Latin Quarter. I knew Delphine Coulin’s literary work and had read somewhere that she’d written and directed this film with her sister. The idea of creative siblings appeals to me, so I was definitely tempted by the film.