Based on a True Story

by Delphine de Vigan

  I must have been around thirty when Agnès published her second novel. She was doing a signing at her publisher’s stand at the Paris Book Fair one evening. Back then I had no intention of publishing anything; I was a company employee and never imagined that my life might one day take another direction than the one I was trying to follow and stabilise, a life whose foundations I was always trying to consolidate, so as to protect me from myself and everything excessive in my character. But I was writing, though within the limits of what seemed acceptable, liveable, to me, a sort of private journal just for me. The idea of writing differently, of writing to be read, represented too great a danger back then. I wasn’t stable enough and I knew it. I didn’t have the psychic structure capable of supporting that sort of scaffolding.

  I had come to see Agnès as I would probably have done if she’d become a singer or dancer, with the kind of additional admiration you have for someone who has accomplished something that seems unattainable to you. Agnès didn’t recognise me. She didn’t remember me, or my name, or my face. I remembered her and her maiden name and what people knew about her and her family. I remembered the kind of girl she was; I could have reminded her of the names of the students she was friends with, Nathalie Azoulai and Hadrien Laroche (both of whom have also published novels since). I can picture them as though I was there, as well as Nathalie Mesuret, whose clear complexion and scarlet lips used to fascinate me. They were the class elite (the cool kids, as my children would say today); they were beautiful and smiling; they were perfectly at home there, in the right place; they had every objective and statistical reason to be there. There was something in their demeanour that seemed to leave no room for doubt. Their parents were proud of them, supported them in their efforts; they belonged to the cultivated, enlightened Parisian world that I was beginning to discover – as I write this, I am well aware that it is pure projection on my part – but that’s how they seemed to me in their ease: entitled.

  I remembered Agnès Desarthe, but she struggled to recognise me. That’s what I wanted to tell L.: we were all someone’s castaway, the one who disappeared; it meant nothing, it had no significance.

  I told L. that I’d kept the class photo (the one that Agnès, that evening at the Book Fair, had asked me to copy for her and that I mailed to her a few weeks later). L. couldn’t get over it: ‘You still have that photo?’

  ‘Of course! I keep all the photos that come my way. I’m crazy about photos. I lose nothing, throw nothing away. I can show you if you like. You can see that you did leave an impression on the film after all!’

  L. thought for a moment and then said: ‘I don’t think I’m in it. In fact, I’m almost certain. I was sick that day.’

  L. looked sad and I felt guilty. We’d been in the same class for a year and I hadn’t recognised her. Nothing familiar about her had struck or intrigued me, and even now I couldn’t recall a figure that could have been her. It’s true she had changed her name and now had her husband’s (though he’d been dead for years), but at no point had her face awakened in me any reminiscence or feeling of déjà-vu.

  We sipped our mojitos in silence for a few minutes. Other, distant images from that fragile year came back to me. It was strange summoning those memories, which I hadn’t thought about for years.

  L. leaned closer, suddenly more serious:

  ‘Your idea isn’t bad, Delphine. But your characters have no soul. You can’t write that sort of thing today. Not in that form. The reader doesn’t care. You have to find something more involving, more personal, something that comes from you and your history. Your characters need some link with life. They have to exist beyond the page, that’s what the reader demands: that it exists, that it breathes. “In real life”, as children say. At this point you cannot be involved in fabrication, artifice, deception. Otherwise your characters will be like paper tissues that get chucked in the first litter bin after they’ve been used. They’ll be forgotten. Because nothing remains of fictional characters who have no link with reality.’

  I was disturbed, but I couldn’t agree with what she said. Didn’t a character have the right to come from nowhere, have no anchorage, and be a pure invention? Did a character have to provide an explanation? I didn’t think so. Because the reader knew what to expect. The reader was always up for yielding to illusion and treating fiction like reality. The reader was capable of that: believing and simultaneously realising that it didn’t exist. Believing as if it were true, while remaining conscious that it was made up. The reader was capable of weeping over the death or the downfall of a character who didn’t exist. It was the opposite of deception.

  Every reader could attest to it. L. was wrong. She only wanted to hear one side of the story. Sometimes fiction was so powerful that it even had reverberations in the real world. When I went to London with Louise and Paul, we visited Sherlock Holmes’ house. Tourists from all over the world were there to see this house. But Sherlock Holmes never existed. Yet people come to see his typewriter, his magnifying glass, his deerstalker, his furniture, his interior, in a reconstruction based on Conan Doyle’s novels. People know this, yet they queue up and pay to visit a house that is just a meticulous recreation of a fiction.

  L. acknowledged this was true. And charming.

  But what she was passionate about, what prevented her sleeping when she was reading a book was not just that it rang true. It was knowing that it had happened. Something had happened and the author had then spent weeks, months or years transforming this material into literature.

  I finished the last of my mojito.

  L. smiled.

  She looked like someone who was not worried, who knew her time would come – someone who didn’t doubt that time would work in her favour, would prove her right.

  15

  When Louise and Paul were born, I stopped writing the private journal I’d kept for years.

  A few months later, writing, which had been chased out through the door, returned through the window, and I began a novel. I’m not sure how this desire made itself known and I can’t say today what incident or encounter allowed me to put it into action. For years, intimate, unfiltered and almost daily writing had helped me know myself, construct myself. It had nothing to do with literature. And now that I was learning to live without it, it seemed to me that I could write other things without really knowing what, or what form they might take.

  So as soon as I had two clear hours, I would work on this story.

  One day I sent off the manuscript inspired by the months I’d spent in hospital as I entered adulthood. An autobiographical novel in the third person, in which I claimed a role for fiction.

  A Parisian publisher received me in his office, visibly flustered. The text, he maintained, lacked reality effects.

  Did I even know what a ‘reality effect’ was?

  Before I had time to reply, he allowed himself to remind me: Roland Barthes had defined it – it was a literary device that clearly indicated to the reader that the text was trying to describe the real world, an element the function of which was to affirm the close relationship between text and reality.

  And, he went on, those were lacking. Why veil your face? The autobiographical aspect of the book was clear, so why pretend to hide? Since the book was testimony, it needed some details that wouldn’t deceive, to reassure the reader about the goods, take full responsibility for the story in the first person, and go on Jean-Luc Delarue’s TV show to talk about it. What’s more, anorexia was becoming fashionable. With a quiver in my voice and a Kleenex in my hand, I told him that if that was all he thought the text was, if it held no other interest, then he shouldn’t publish it. I added (my voice rising in spite of myself) that one of my best friends had worked with Jean-Luc Delarue for ten years. And if telling my story on TV was all that this was about, I needn’t have written a book. I managed to hold back my tears, but only just. I had never set foot in a publisher’s office. I’d taken an afternoon off work to attend this meeting. I’d spent two o
r three days thinking about the kind of outfit that would be appropriate to wear in this sort of situation. I may even have bought a skirt or a blouse specially. It flashed into my mind that I could just run, but I didn’t. I was too well brought up.

  At the top of the stairs, we said an awkward goodbye.

  I had nothing against reality effects; I adored them, was passionate about them, but the publisher was talking about something different. He wanted me to inscribe the text in the Real. He wanted me to say to the reader, Please note, sir or madam, that everything I tell you is authentic; here is a book that smells of Lived Experience, 100 per cent autobiographical, here is Real Truth, here is Life in the raw, guaranteed additive-free, reality that has not undergone any transformation, especially of the literary variety.

  That’s what I was thinking about as I walked home, slightly drunk, having parted from L. outside the bar where we’d had a third cocktail. The two of us had had a good laugh, sitting at the back, because in the end the conversation had switched to our adolescent crushes, from the time before Barthes and all that lot, when we’d pinned up posters in our bedrooms.

  I’d told L. about the two years around the age of sixteen when I had contracted and then developed a spectacular fixation on Ivan Lendl, a Czech tennis player of unattractive physique whose obscure and striking beauty I perceived, to the extent that I subscribed to Tennis magazine (though I’d never picked up a racket in my life) and spent hours in front of the TV broadcasts from the Roland-Garros tournament and then Wimbledon, instead of revising for my baccalaureate. L. was stunned. She’d adored him too! It was definitely the first time I’d met someone who loved Ivan Lendl, one of the most hated players in tennis history, probably because of his austere features, which nothing could crease, and his methodical, ponderous baseline game. In all likelihood, it was because he was so tall, thin and misunderstood that I loved him so much. At exactly the same time, L. was following all Ivan Lendl’s matches too. She remembered it all perfectly, especially the famous Roland-Garros final he played against John McEnroe, which Lendl won after an unusually dramatic and intense battle. The photographs showed him victorious, his face distorted with exhaustion, and for the first time the whole world saw him smile. L. knew everything about him, remembered all the little details about Lendl’s life and career that I’d forgotten. It was amazing, more than twenty years on, to imagine us both mesmerised in front of our television sets, her in the suburbs of Paris and me in a village in Normandy, both ardently wishing for the victory of the man from the east. L. also knew what Ivan Lendl had become since; she’d followed it all closely, his career and his private life. Lendl was married and the father of four children; he lived in the US, trained young tennis players and had had his teeth fixed. L. disapproved of this last point, the disappearance of the Czech smile (teeth unevenly spaced and, you imagined, overlapping) for an American smile (dazzlingly white, perfectly aligned false teeth); in her view, he’d lost all his charm. I could check on the internet if I didn’t believe her.

  It was a funny coincidence. One of several things we had in common that brought us closer.

  But something else had come back into my mind.

  When I returned to Paris to begin my studies, I signed up with an agency that recruited hostesses for various trade fairs and events. But very quickly it became apparent that I didn’t match the profile. I lacked something, wasn’t quite right, and every week, while the other girls were sent off to the exhibition centre at the Palais des congrès or to the motor show, the agency offered me, and some of the others, missions in hypermarkets in distant suburbs, vaguely accessible by RER. Standing in front of the shelves or at the head of a gondola, I demonstrated perfume brands, or mince, or washing powder; I did tastings of dehydrated crêpes, snacks and soft cheese I cut by hand. I gave out leaflets on roller skates, wore vaguely peasant-style lace aprons, headscarves or promotional T-shirts; I repeated happy slogans in the run-up to Mother’s Day or Easter weekend to the point that I dreamt about them at night. After several months of working hard, if we got a good grade on our spot checks, we might hope to be sent to a shop in an inner suburb or even central Paris.

  And so, in the second year of my preparatory course, I was sent on a two-day placement to the Bon Marché department store. It was an undreamt of sign of recognition, an amazing promotion. No need to catch the train at dawn, no cafeteria with orange walls and flickering neon lights. I had to stand at the top of an escalator and spend the day handing out discount vouchers for a new range of haircare products that a cosmetics company was launching in the department stores. I wore an outfit supplied by the agency, but its crumpled material didn’t hide its poor fit. The most ridiculous thing, though, was the viscose scarf we had to tie round our necks, a pathetic imitation of a Hermès square on which the brand’s name appeared as a pattern. It was almost 5 p.m. and I could feel my feet swelling up (a friend had lent me a pair of shoes that were a little too small) when I saw them coming up, standing in the middle of the escalator in a group. I hadn’t foreseen this: the strong probability of meeting students from my school in the 7th arrondissement on a Saturday. I can no longer really visualise their faces, and I don’t know their names. Nor do I know whether they were students from my class or the other preparatory group. They nudged each other as they passed me. There were quite a lot of them. Some of them stopped, looked back. I heard laughter. The girls snorted and the boys made jokes. One of them had taken one of my vouchers without looking at me. He began making fun of what it said and the girls laughed even harder. I remember that they were pretty and I felt like something the cat had dragged in, in a second-rate suit reminiscent of an air hostess. I pretended not to notice they had stopped just behind me, sniggering at me, repeating the same phrases over and over: Hello, madam, here you are, do please take one, here’s a money-off voucher for our shampoos, conditioners, face masks, an exceptional range of haircare products, don’t hesitate, go and have a look at our launch offers, over there, yes, the first department on the right. A woman asked me if she could have two, and I gave her another voucher. She wanted to know if the products were anti-dandruff and it seemed to me that the laughter behind me increased, and then suddenly I heard a girl’s voice coming from the group, full of indignation and contempt: ‘God, you’re complete idiots. Are you really the nation’s elite, little dickheads who’ve never made anything apart from your beds, taking the piss out of a girl who spends her Saturdays working? Have you looked at yourselves?’

  I kept handing out my coupons at the top of the escalator, like an automaton whose movements couldn’t be stopped by anything. I was having trouble breathing. My whole body was tensed towards them. I was waiting for them to go, without looking at them. I wanted them all to leave, to disappear. I heard their voices drift off and waited a bit longer before turning round. I saw their backs. They were elbowing each other. I didn’t manage to identify the girl who had put an end to my ordeal.

  But that evening, when I left the café and walked down the street alone, reliving a scene I hadn’t thought about for years, the voice I heard was L.’s.

  In these superimposed impressions, and their obviousness, I was certain that L. was the girl I hadn’t seen, who had moved the group on.

  16

  During September, I was away again, helping the children settle in. Paul had got a room in the halls of residence at his school and Louise had found a flat-share with two friends who’d gone to do the same course as her. The trips to IKEA and Castorama, a few days in Tournai and then Lyons, took up the first weeks of the new term and kept the question of writing at bay. I was happy to be able to make the most of these times with the children. To delay the moment of separation.

  I didn’t have the mental space to get down to it; that’s how I explained it to L. one night when she asked me on the phone how my project was going. In a gentle tone, without pressing, she asked if all this (the trips, the children moving out, documents to fill in, purchases to make) didn’t give me a conveni
ent alibi for not recognising my inability to sit down and write, an inability linked to the project itself and not the circumstances. At other times, hadn’t I been able to find the necessary time and space when I was working four days a week in a distant suburb? In her view, I was refusing to acknowledge that my idea was no good and that I’d been working for months on territory that wasn’t right for me, which even ran counter to the way my work had developed. Wasn’t it this mismatch, to which I was vainly clinging on, that was stopping me writing? She’d leave me to think this over. The question seemed fundamental to her, and she could allow herself to share it with me now that we were friends. She wasn’t certain; it was just an intuition.

  I didn’t come up with arguments to contradict her.

  It was true that in busier periods I’d found time to write.

  But I was no longer so young and I no longer had the energy, it was as simple as that.

  I showed L., who was so interested in my working methods (like no one before), my current notebooks, three or four of the same size, with smooth, soft covers that François had bought me at an Edward Hopper exhibition. Each cover had a reproduction of one of the artist’s pictures.

  I take notes in small notebooks. I like fine, light ones with soft covers and lined pages. I keep them at the bottom of my bag wherever I go, when I travel and on holiday, and I always put one on my bedside table at night. I jot down ideas or phrases for my work in progress, but also other words, the titles of future books, the openings of stories. Sometimes I decide to get organised: for a few weeks, one notebook is for ideas related to the work in progress and another is reserved for later work. It has happened that in periods of ferment, I’ve had five or six notebooks on the go, each of which corresponded to a different project. I always end up mixing everything up.

  I gave my editor the impression that everything was going fine. I used rather vague language to distance myself from the lie: I was doing some extra research, I was preparing the ground, I was consolidating the foundations . . .