Although he no longer teaches at his institute in Nice, since the French literary circuit decided to adopt him after publishing his first book, Anthony Passeron has not yet completely lost the manners of a teacher, the kind that tends to round the grade up and never They raise their voices. It took him a while to start writing but when he did he knew exactly what he had to tell, the story of his uncle Desiré, his father’s brother, his wife, Brigitte, and their daughter, Émilie, who They died of AIDS before drugs managed to turn the virus into a chronic disease.
The family story of the shame of some butchers in a town in the interior of the Maritime Alps marks an exploration that alternates with another journalistic narrative, that of the race established by French and American scientists to first identify HIV and to treat it. to stop it later. The sleeping children (Asteroide / L’Altra) will also become a television series in which the author acts as a consultant, while he finalizes a second novel that seems to emerge naturally from the first and will tell the story of his absent father , Desiré’s brother. The one who did not know how to digest his anger at what he read as a family collapse.
I understand that this book has changed your life.
The first thing has been a change in my profession, I have no longer acted as a teacher to my students. I dedicate all my time to working on this book. And I have realized how important it was to do so. In my middle-class family, books were more about fantasy than necessity. I have written a book that seemed to me to be a necessity, to not forget a generation, an epidemic and the things that happened. I was very struck by an interview with Annie Ernaux, in which she said “I don’t fully experience things until I write them” and I also have that feeling a bit. It seems to me that this story finds a purpose 40 years later thanks to this book. On the other hand, on a personal level, the book has not resolved the drama that my family has experienced, but it does give it a different dimension.
Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux gave him a very powerful ‘blurb’. She says her book is sublime.
I don’t live in a world where it would occur to me to ask such an important writer for something like that. It was my editor’s doing. I had told him how Annie Ernaux’s work had empowered me to write this book. Before her, I read without thinking I could do it. Her books, those of Édouard Louis and those of Didier Eribon made me think that she could write. She is a type of writer who doesn’t close the door behind her. You have the impression that she is telling you that you too can question your life and review certain episodes and advance them thanks to writing.
In addition to that permission, what made you break the great family silence forty years later?
When I was a teenager, I saw on television what the activists fighting against AIDS, people from Act Up in Paris, were doing, and I thought about how there are people who can assume their HIV positivity, when three people had died in my family and we were not able nor to pronounce the word “AIDS.” It was a blind spot in family history. The reason for this book is to take the power of words and through words. That’s what made me think: I can’t leave this family in silence, I have a responsibility, the responsibility of my generation that has seen the drama but has been protected. I think that in my generation, the word had a liberating dimension. In my parents’ house, they found refuge in silence. In fact, they look at my work with respect but with a question. There is a generational gap there.
The devastation caused by AIDS was very present in public conversation and in art, then it almost completely disappeared and now it is people of his generation who are speaking again, as children of that. There are examples such as that of the filmmaker Carla Simón and her film Estiu 1993.
A hypothesis that I propose is that for a few years the violence of the disease, of social condemnation… was so devastating that the people close to it, once they closed the coffin, were exhausted. They no longer had the strength to speak and make the speech stick. Then when tritherapy arrived it made the suffering bodies disappear. Since 1996, HIV-positive people have stopped dying in Western countries and AIDS has disappeared from the landscape, although the pandemic continues. That has made the issue disappear. It is no coincidence that it is the children or nephews, as is my case, who have lived that story in a truncated way, with a mixture of reality and fiction, because they were considered children. We find the story incomplete. You realize that you are part of a collective history of the late 20th century and you want to add your piece to that gigantic puzzle.
I especially liked the book’s sense of place, which places its story in this inland region, in the shadow of the Côte d’Azur. The road scenes, in which his grandparents have to travel to the hospital in Nice along a road full of curves, are very revealing and very different from almost all the urban stories we have read about the epidemic.
I studied Geography and I got very bored. And for a long time I thought: what use have my studies been? When you enter active life you realize to what extent all the accumulated knowledge has been of no use to you. When I started writing the book I realized that the story and I myself were impacted by the geography. There were no books on drug addiction and AIDS in this place. When I had to tell the scenes in which my grandparents go to the hospital in Nice to visit an infectologist, I began to imagine my grandparents in front of a big urban doctor, I thought: I have to tell where they come from because otherwise the reader won’t go. to understand to what extent that meeting was exceptional.
All the authors you mentioned (Louis, Ernaux, Eribon) are authors of declassification. Social class is also an important theme in his book. For those small-town merchants, maintaining the family reputation is key.
Absolutely. I didn’t want to say that it was more difficult to be a drug addict in a small town, but it is something special. In a small town where everyone knows each other and there are only 50 surnames, it is more difficult to accept a child’s illness. In a family of well-known and respected merchants, above all. I wanted to tell what drug addiction and AIDS disturb and alter. Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis, due to their international success, raise the theme of the class turncoat. My family came from a modest town but within the town they were not part of the most modest. I describe myself more as a geographical turncoat than a social one. If today I am far from my family it is because I do not live in the town, but I am not richer than they have been. I live in a different galaxy, in Nice, an hour’s drive from my town. We were talking before about that road, which is my life. I could take the car and explore it with my eyes closed. For people who live in Nice today that route is austere and complicated. For me, it is the trip of a lifetime.
There is an important character in the book and a bombshell quote about him, his father.
The book is an attempt to respond to his anger, his rage. I wondered: does he still feel it? Her anger came from judging her brother for causing this misfortune, as if he were responsible. The driving force behind the writing is to tell this to my father, as the interlocutor. In fact, my father is the only interlocutor in this book. There was a version where I spoke to him in the second person, but it didn’t work, so I changed. This book is for everyone, but the one I was addressing was my father, to tell him: drugs came from one place, it is a catastrophe of society, not of the family.
Do you have contact with your father?
No, I don’t, and that’s why I write the book. It is an indirect possibility to talk to him. My second novel is interested in his own story, after being interested in the story of his brother. The absence of it is a writing engine.
When you talk about cousin Émilie, a point of guilt is detected in you and your brother. Do you think that you, as children, reproduced the silence of adults?
Without a doubt, yes. The boy I was never considered himself a boy. I clearly saw the guilt, not just mine. Being a child and experiencing the death of another child in the family, you experience survivor’s guilt. I wanted to untangle the mess between my story and the one my family has told me. In a way I try to transform this guilt into a literary experience, to give it meaning. Furthermore, HIV-positive children are hardly represented in cinema and literature. In a first version, the book ended with the death of my uncle but then I realized that if I wanted to fight against silence, that had to be there.
The other important part of the book is the chronicle of the investigation. He says that those doctors were also rebels within the medical establishment, that they did not fit in. What did the scientists who worked on that effort have in common?
It was not something planned but I have been aware of this as the investigation progressed. It parallels bravery and loneliness and it is not by chance. A special sensitivity was needed. The first French doctor to discover cases of AIDS, Willy Rosenbaum, is in some ways a marginal. Very left-wing, very committed. He had worked in Guatemala. He was almost an alien in the Parisian medical society. He and the doctors who began to collaborate with him continue to say it: we were a bunch of crazy people. The French health ministry is not interested in this until the Pasteur Institute team begins to attract international attention.
…And then the investigation becomes a matter of national pride.
Even those who did not want to help them at the beginning try to take credit away from the pioneers. The great humanity that is still there among these doctors is striking. Now years have passed and they have been recognized, they have received their medals, but they all continue to maintain that humility of simply having done their job. On one occasion I went to a medal presentation to Willy Rosenbaum and he said two things that moved me very much. One, that he simply did his job. And the second, that it was striking that first they expelled him from the hospital and now they gave him medals. That contrast seems very novel to me.
