Although he no longer teaches at his high school in Nice, Anthony Passeron has not completely lost his teacher’s ways, those who tend to round up the grade and never 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 the daughter of both, Émilie, who 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 village in the interior of the Maritime Alps alternates with another narrative of a journalistic nature, that of the race established by French scientists against HIV. The sleeping children (The Other / Asteroid) will also become a television series.
This book changed your life, didn’t it?
The first was a change in my profession, I have never been a teacher again. I have written a book that was a necessity, that of not forgetting a generation, an epidemic and the things that happened.
Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux says her book is sublime.
The work of Annie Ernaux has authorized me, in a way, to write this book. Before her, I read without thinking that I could do it. His books, those of Édouard Louis and those of Didier Eribon made me think that I could write.
What made him break the great family silence forty years later?
When I was a teenager, I saw on TV what the activists who fought against AIDS were doing, and I thought how is it that there are people who can accept their seropositivity, when three people in my family had died and we were not even able to pronounce the word AIDS. It was a dead end in family history.
All the authors you mentioned (Louis, Ernaux, Eribon) are authors of declassification. In his book, social class is also an important theme.
I didn’t mean it was harder 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.
There is an important character in the book and a bombshell about him, who is her father.
The book is an attempt to respond to his anger, his rage. I was wondering: do you still feel her? His anger came from judging his brother for having caused that misfortune, as if he was responsible, the driving force behind the writing is to explain this to my father, as an interlocutor. In fact, my father is the only interlocutor in this book. This book is for everyone, but the person I was addressing was my father, to tell him: the drug came from somewhere, it is a catastrophe for society, not for the family.
Do you have contact with your father?
No, I don’t, and that’s why I’m writing the book. It is an indirect possibility to speak to it.
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.
The first French doctor to discover AIDS cases, Willy Rosenbaum, is an outsider. Very leftist, very committed. He had worked in Guatemala. He was almost an alien in Parisian medical society. He and the doctors who started collaborating with him keep saying it: we were a bunch of crazy people. The French Ministry of Health was not interested in this.
Until the investigation becomes a matter of national pride.
They even try to take credit from the pioneers who didn’t want to help them in the beginning. Willy Rosenbaum said it was meaningful to him that first he was kicked out of the hospital and now he was being given medals. This contrast seems very novel to me.
