My writer friends often hear a phrase that journalists and taxi travelers are also sometimes told: “I would give my life for a book.”
And all those who say that are right. Anyone deserves a book because every human life contains the full DNA of the passions, subtleties, and complexities of what it means to be a person. If Sophie Calle followed people who passed her on the street and photographed them, turning them into art, any good writer could make random biographies of the first person she met. Stories are overrated, in literature only good storytellers count.
Lately it has become fashionable to narrate, starkly and without prejudice, the concrete life of the writers themselves (Knausgård, Ernaux, Milena Busquets, Miguel Ángel Oeste…). This is what the Frenchman Édouard Louis does in Lucha y metamorfosis de una mujer, where he portrays his own mother, Monique, who lived subjected to more than two decades by her partners, who beat her and humiliated her, plunged into both material and spiritual poverty –sessions daily 12-hour non-stop television–, collecting free food in care centers, never being able to travel… and that, one fine day –after twenty years of submission–, moved by an unknown spring, she threw out the window (put in bags) the husband’s things, closed the door and, in a process that her son narrates with moving efficiency (bring handkerchiefs) she turned into a butterfly.
Louis, a successful writer, looks at a youthful photo of his mother, where she looks radiant, happy, before dating violent and alcoholic men – who were nevertheless delicious in the courtship period – and feels that that cheerful girl has fallen hibernated and has re-emerged in mature age. Fight… is, in addition to a brutal portrait of a double oppression (that of the social structure and that of the family), the love song, without kitsch, of a son to her mother. Catherine Deneuve was so moved that she asked the author for Monique’s new address –the concierge of a building in a bourgeois neighborhood– and one fine day she stood there to have tea and chat for hours.