“My child, my sister”, by Eric Fottorino: the mourning of a living woman

2023-11-09 15:04:21

My child, my sister

Eric Fottorino

Gallimard, 290 p., 21 €

Approaching sixty, Éric Fottorino learned one day from his mother that he had a sister, born three years after him. This secret, too heavy, kept too long, she had suddenly released in front of her three sons, stunned.

About this girl who was taken from her one morning in January 1963, at birth in a religious institution in Bordeaux, whom she neither saw nor even touched, she has no information. Not even his first name. No trace, no archival document, no civil status certificate. She abandoned her, under the relentless pressure of her mother, ashamed to discover her pregnant again, and who had already wanted to deprive her of her first child, Eric.

This traumatic scene opened Seventeen yearspublished in 2018, Eric Fottorino’s previous book in the long series of his intimate stories, in search of his origins at the heart of a complex, double-bottomed genealogy.

“I had a daughter. It was taken from me. » These simple words leave him speechless for weeks, before embarking on a quest for unfound clues, falling into a frenzied investigation, like a private detective. Thinking of his mother, walled in this silence, he writes: “how without seeing anything/did I pass so close/to his misfortune”.

1960s Bordeaux

This astonishing and heartbreaking book, “the story of another age/an outrage”, he wrote it in the form of a long prose poem, in free verse, without punctuation. Éric Fottorino is not making up for lost time. He fulfills it. He fills the void of the absence of this lost sister, a phantom member, by imagining what their childhood together could have been like. He recomposes the Bordeaux of the 1960s where he would have grown up with her, accomplice and protector. He also reconstructs the scattered signs of his mother’s buried grief, which he could not guess: “what greater pain/than the mourning of a living person”.

Magnificent and moving book on the suffering of abandonment, in pursuit of an elusive shadow. This anonymous evaporation, snatched by force, haunts Éric Fottorino, invades him, obsesses him. And if she is alive, did he come across her without knowing it?

My child, my sister. Behind this title, inspired by An invitation to travel, by Baudelaire, Éric Fottorino confronts the uncertainties, disappointments and discoveries of crossing the unknown without reference points. Jumping into the void, his long monologue translates the tension of a crazy wait, with the modulated breathing of the diver of the depths, in apnea, eyes open, in the dizziness of the abyss.