Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

I shall reproduce the exchange I had with L. here. I noted it down that evening almost as soon as I got home. It was impossible to go to bed. In an exercise book, which I found in the box of school materials, I tried to reconstruct the conversation down to its smallest detail, probably to distance myself from it, to keep it outside me. I may have sensed that that exchange contained its own delayed reaction and that it would spread slowly. I remember feeling afraid I’d forget it and that it might work on me unawares.

  In the early months of our relationship, I continued to note our exchanges and L.’s monologues in this exercise book. Until the day when I could no longer write anything, but I shall come back to that.

  L. looked up at me. It seemed as though she was trying to control the timbre of her voice, and even more, her delivery. ‘I didn’t imagine for a second that you were thinking of writing something like that. I read an article in Le Monde des Livres where you talked about a “phantom book”, an even more personal one that you’d probably eventually get to. A secret book, hidden within that one.’

  I knew exactly which interview she meant. I pretended I had only a vague recollection of it. ‘Really? Did I say that?’

  ‘Yes, you talked about a trajectory that passed through different points and said it would be hard to go back to fiction now. I read your last book with that in mind, the idea it had within it another, more important, more dangerous one.’

  I was starting to feel hot.

  I explained to L. that I’d been wrong. I’d done that interview in early August, several weeks before the book came out. I’d had no idea what would happen, what the book would stir up. I thought I’d foreseen its consequences, but I was wide of the mark. I didn’t have broad enough shoulders for it. I wasn’t up to it – it was as simple as that. That was why I now wanted to go back to fiction, to tell a story, invent characters, owe no debt to reality.

  ‘So it’s all about comfort?’

  She wasn’t hiding her irritation. I was taken aback.

  ‘In a way, it is about comfort, yes. Mine and other people’s. A tenable, bearable position that enables . . .’

  ‘People couldn’t care less. They get plenty of fables and characters, they’ve got adventures and plot twists coming out their ears. People have had enough of well-constructed intrigue, clever plot hooks and denouements. They’ve had enough of stories that are cranked out to sell books or cars or yoghurt. Stories produced in bulk and endlessly interchangeable. Take it from me, readers expect something different from literature and they’re right: they expect the Real, the authentic. They want to be told about life, don’t you see? Literature mustn’t mistake its territory.’

  I thought for a moment before responding: ‘Is it so important whether the way life’s described in books is true or invented?’

  ‘Yes, it’s important. It’s important that it’s true.’

  ‘But who claims to know? People, as you say, maybe only need it to ring true. Like a musical note. Anyway, maybe that’s the mystery of writing: it’s true or it isn’t. I think people know that nothing of what we write is entirely alien to us. They know there’s always a thread, a theme, a fault line that links us to the text. But they accept that we transpose things, condense them and move them around. Dress them up. And that we invent.’

  That was what I believed. Or wanted to believe. I was well placed to know to what extent ‘people’, or at least some readers, loved the Real, tried to disentangle it from the story, pursuing it from book to book. How many of them had wanted to know how much of my previous books was autobiographical? The real-life part. How many of them had asked if I’d really lived on the street, if I’d experienced a passion for an egocentric, duplicitous TV presenter, if I’d suffered workplace bullying? How many of them had asked after reading my last novel: ‘Is it all true?’

  But I wanted to believe something different: that the encounter with a book – the intimate, visceral, emotional, aesthetic encounter with a book – takes place somewhere else.

  I could feel a silent, brutal anger taking hold of L.

  ‘So your last novel was just a story like any other, then? It had no special importance? You imagine you’ve done enough for the truth to be told? And now that you’ve taken a little step sideways and almost sprained your ankle, you feel entitled to return to your comfort zone?’

  I could feel her look of indignation trained on me like a weapon. I was starting to feel guilty about something that didn’t exist, the first line of which I had not written, which was crazy.

  ‘But there’s no such thing as truth. Truth doesn’t exist. My last book was just a clumsy, incomplete attempt to get closer to something ungraspable. A way of telling the story through a distorting lens, a prism of pain and regrets and denial. And love. You know all that anyway. As soon as you elide, or prolong, or tighten up, or fill the gaps, you’re writing fiction. You’re right, I was looking for the truth. I brought together sources, viewpoints, versions. But any writing about the self is a novel. The story is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. No book should be authorised to have that printed on its cover.’

  L. didn’t respond.

  I thought for a second about quoting Jules Renard’s famous remark (‘as soon as the truth goes beyond five lines, it’s a novel’) but stopped myself. L. was not the sort of person who would be impressed by a quotation out of context. She refilled our glasses and then came over to me.

  ‘I’m not talking about the result. I’m talking about the intention. The impulse. Writing must be a search for the truth, or else it’s nothing. If you don’t seek to know yourself through writing, to explore what’s inside you, your make-up, to re-open your wounds, to scratch and dig with your hands, if you don’t question who you are, where you came from, what’s around you, it’s meaningless. The only sort of writing is writing about the self. Nothing else counts. That’s why your book got such a reaction. You left the territory of the novel, you left behind artifice and lies and pretence. You went back to the Truth, and your readers were not mistaken. They’re expecting you to persevere, to go further. They want what has been hidden, concealed. They want you to get to the point where you say what you’ve always avoided. They want to know what you’re made of, where you come from. What violence engendered the writer you’ve turned into. They’re not stupid. You only lifted part of the veil and they’re fully aware of it. If you’re going to write more little stories about the homeless or depressed middle managers, you should just have stayed in your marketing office.’

  I was stunned.

  In confrontations I lose my composure, I get breathless, the blood stops going to my brain, I become unable to express a sequence of coherent arguments. I defended myself in a ridiculous way, correcting the detail as though it were the essential: ‘I worked in social observation, not in marketing. That’s got nothing to do with it.’

  I would happily have explained to L. what it was about, as a diversion, but L. put down her knife and disappeared. She was gone for a few minutes. I heard water running in the bathroom.

  When she came back, I thought she’d been crying.

  But that made no sense. Why would L. be so concerned about my next book? She had put some blusher on her cheeks and tied her hair back. And she’d put a cardigan on over her blouse. I spoke softly to try to calm things down: ‘You know, fiction, autofiction and autobiography are never fixed positions for me; they’re not a claim or even an intention. They’re possibly a result. In fact, I don’t think I see the borders in such a clear fashion. My works of fiction are just as personal and intimate as the others. You sometimes need dressing up in order to explore the material. The important thing is the authenticity of the act. I mean its inevitability, its absence of calculation.’

  I couldn’t find the right words. I was aware of showing regrettable naiveté in front of L. I was upset. I wanted to go further, defend myself. But in this confrontation, there was something at work that deprived me of the means.

  After a short silence, she said, ‘That’s
not what I’m talking about. You’re the one who’s talking about that. I couldn’t care less about codes or pacts or labels. I’m talking about the act. What keeps you at your desk. I’m talking about the reason why you’re tied to your chair, like a dog, for days on end, when no one’s forcing you to be there.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, that’s something you can’t keep ignoring.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  I didn’t know what we were talking about any more, or how all this had started.

  L. went back to making dinner. I watched her dry the vegetables she had just rinsed. I sensed that she was making an effort to slow her movements down, recover the rhythm that would show she was calm and that none of this mattered. I watched L., the speed of her movements in a relatively small space, her way of moving around the counter, opening cupboards, brushing against objects, corners, surfaces, a form of haste without reason, of impatience. L. tossed the vegetables into the hot oil in the wok.

  She took the knife she’d used to cut them, rinsed it carefully under the water, wiped the blade with a soapy sponge, then dried it gently with a dishtowel. She put it in a drawer and took out a packet of cashew nuts, which she emptied into a little bowl. Without looking at me, she said: ‘I know what your hidden book is. I’ve known from the start. I realised the first time I met you. You have it within you. We have it within us. You and I. If you don’t write it, it’s going to catch up with you.’

  13

  I didn’t hear from L. the day after this dinner.

  For several days, L. disappeared from my life, creating a sort of break or gap I was unprepared for.

  I missed L. I remember thinking she might be punishing me, though that made no sense. I tried to call her several times, left a couple of messages, but got no answer.

  The following weekend, Louise and Paul went off on holiday with their friends. Paul went camping in Brittany and Louise had been invited to go down south. That same evening, a courier delivered a wonderful bouquet of flowers with a little note from L.; I forget the exact wording. In essence, she apologised for losing her temper and was sorry about how heated our discussion had become. I sent a text to reassure her.

  I was alone in Paris and eagerly waiting for François to come back to France for two weeks before he set off again on another long trip to the US. I knew how important the documentary series was to him, how long he’d dreamed about it. We’d talked to each other about these long periods apart. I’d encouraged him to go. François never questioned the time I devoted to writing or my way of life.

  When he got back, we immediately set off for the country.

  In the preceding years, as the number of invitations he received increased, François had – in an inversely proportional movement of retraction – gradually retreated to his domain, so to speak, to this place which he’d chosen as a point of anchorage on the smooth, slippery surface of the world.

  On the day I first met François, as we drank margaritas at the bar in a provincial nightclub, he told me about this house not far from Paris that he was having a lot of work done on. He told me the opportunity to be somewhere silent, to get away, had become necessary to him, vital even. I told him straight out that I hated the countryside. It had nothing to do with nature, which I had nothing against – it was something else. The countryside for me was synonymous with isolation and contained an inherent notion of danger. The countryside was associated with fear and a certain idea of imprisonment.

  I have no recollection of this conversation; it was François who told me much later how much what I said had unsettled him. We’d clearly embarked on a process of seduction and he had never known someone shoot themselves in the foot like that, right at the start, flouting the codes, not looking for coincidences or things in common, but instead emphasising disagreements and incompatibilities. Nonetheless, we eventually found common ground when we talked about the songs we used to listen to on Hit FM (we listed a few and this shared culture of summer music videos made us laugh).

  I could describe the first time I went to Courseilles, nearly three years after that first conversation, and the strange route that finally led me to this man (and him to me), as I described it to L., at her request, shortly after we met. L. never hid the fact that she found our ‘association’ strange; I think that was the word she used (she didn’t say ‘couple’ or ‘the relationship you’re in’ or ‘your love’); from her lips, it was explicitly a case of chalk and cheese. L. always seemed intrigued by the relationship François and I had and displayed a degree of perplexity about it. She wasn’t alone. It took me some time to understand and probably to admit that beyond my own prejudices, we had a lot in common. At first I insisted on taking stock of ways in which we were opposites, or different from each other, deriving comfort from the idea that our worlds had no points of intersection – or if there were any, they were contingent and provisional. Later, when I had access to his inner self, when I finally understood who this man was, what animated him, where his energy and his flaws came from, when I was able to see what was behind the mask – sometimes open, sometimes guarded, sometimes arrogant and distant – he presented to the world, I understood the love that could be born from our meeting and I stopped feeling afraid.

  When I was at Courseilles, L. finally called me. I was glad to hear from her. She acted as though no shadow had fallen between us. She wanted to hear my news, be sure that I was resting properly; the past few months had been so full of emotions, it was normal and even desirable that I should allow myself some time, that I had a break. I was on the phone with her quite a long time; I remember because the wind wasn’t in the right direction and I had to go to the end of the garden and perch on a little mound of earth, the only place where network access is more or less constant when the wind’s in the north. I remember that I felt touched and reassured by this call. L. was thinking about me. Once again, L. seemed to understand better than anyone what the past year had meant to me, the energy it had demanded, the doubts that had formed, the ambivalence of my feelings, the intimate mingling of feelings of plenitude and emptiness. Once again, it seemed to me that L. alone knew where I was at, even from a distance. Because L. had noticed the strange coincidence of these two events: the last book – which had gone beyond me, literally and metaphorically, and was now somewhere outside myself – and the children getting ready to leave.

  L. told me she’d be in Paris all summer finishing a manuscript that she had to deliver in early autumn, an account of a recent news story; she couldn’t reveal more for the moment, but it was a big project with a lot riding on it. But staying on in Paris alone didn’t scare her, she liked the city when it slowed down and was given over to the tourists; she’d go on holiday a bit later. She asked me what plans I had for August and I remember telling her about our famous ‘holiday house’, as the children called it when they were small, a term that didn’t designate a place so much as a time, the inevitable meeting repeated down the years. Every summer with the same friends that I met when I was about twenty, we rented a house for two or three weeks, a big one, never the same one twice and never twice in the same place. The first summers we went away together we didn’t have children. Now they were the same age as us when we spent the night bar-hopping in a seaside resort on Spain’s Atlantic coast. Now the holiday house accommodates anything from eighteen to twenty-five people depending on the year, children included, the shape of the group always varying around the same core, onto which some related characters have been grafted over the years, with the approval of the others.

  Friends we can claim have changed our lives are rare, with the peculiar certainty that, without them, our life quite simply would not have been the same; with the intimate conviction that the impact of this link, its influence, is not just limited to a few dinner parties or holidays, but that it has radiated out, spread far beyond, that it has affected our most important choices, profoundly altered our way of being and contributed to affirming our way of life. My holiday-ho
use friends are that sort: fundamental. Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for them, it seems), they long ago left Paris.

  To be honest, most of my friends have left Paris. They now live in Nantes, Angers, Valence, Rocbaron, Caen, Évecquemont, Montpellier.

  Perched on a little mound of earth at the bottom of the garden in Courseilles, as the air began to grow cool (going in for a pullover would have meant losing the signal and so interrupting the conversation), I don’t know how I came to tell L. about the wave of departures that had left me like an orphan a few years previously, before I felt able to make ties with new people. I told L. how one after another my friends packed up and took their children, as though plague had struck the city, and the absurd feeling of loss, or even abandonment, that I felt when, within five years, they’d all gone.

  L. said she understood. She knew the feeling; she’d even experienced it herself. Her friends hadn’t gone off to the provinces; they’d simply disappeared after the death of her husband. She promised she’d tell me about it one day. She wished me a good holiday, and said she’d be thinking about me.

  In August, François flew off to Wyoming and I took the train to the holiday house with Louise and Paul.

  For the first time in ages, I felt as though things were regaining their normal shape and dimensions, as though all of this – the novel that had come out a few months before and the ripples of reaction to it, the succession of concentric circles that had spread incalculably far and profoundly altered my relationship with some of my family – as though all of this had never existed.

  There, among the people who didn’t regard me differently, whose looks had not darkened or become veiled, who had remained far from that vain agitation but very close to me, it seemed as though my body relaxed.

  We laughed, slept, drank, danced; we talked and walked for hours. I told myself that one day I’d write about them, my friends who were dispersed all over, those from childhood and adulthood, and about those twenty-five or forty years that had seen us grow up and become parents, change lives, careers, homes and sometimes partners.