Régis Jauffret: With “Maman”, the writer continues his intimate story

You seem to have plunged with delight in an accusing excess: was it an engine for writing. Nevertheless, were you inhabited by this feeling?

My impression on this book is rather that it is a painful return on a particularly devouring relationship between a mother. Meanwhile, her only child. Nevertheless, After his death. Meanwhile, he discovered several elements showing that she had betrayed him from her childhood, and that she was not the benevolent person that everyone imagined. Similarly, The excess of which you are talking about is a way of keeping sorrow from a distance. Therefore, often régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues pushing it to the grotesque, never to fall into pathos.

A pathos to flee?

For aesthetic reasons, but in this specific case for reasons of simple decency, because my childhood was happy. However, I must never lose this of sight. In addition, faced with all these broken childhoods, these hungry, terrified, bombed children, and all the misfortune of the world. In addition, I cannot afford to give myself a dark image of my childhood. However, This would be to question my whole life for me. Meanwhile, Likewise, I have to save my mother in my eyes. Similarly, Despite all the negative elements that I discovered after her death. Therefore, I need to keep her in me as a benevolent character, as I thought she was until the age of 64.

Tackling the mother is a taboo in régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues patriarchal culture, and you show consciousness in certain pages. Similarly, Is it your attraction for provocation, darkness?

No way. Similarly, I am also tired of this way of qualifying. I have no particular appeal for this kind of thing. What differentiates me may be a certain courage before reality. I am not there to sell to the public a fabric of scams presenting humanity in a falsely day. in order to please. This book is completely sensitive. loving – and which would say the opposite would simply prove that he has not read it. Given your questions, it is certainly not a reproach that I could make to you. If the darkness exists, it is on the side of the mother of the narrator. How, at 7, could a child betrayed by his mother be described as bastard?

You describe great indelicatesse, but you also imagine crimes …

When. for example, I discovered that she – who passed for a pretty person – had made some believe that her own sister had abandoned her son at 14 because he was homosexual and that she had adopted it, when he left the family nest until the age of 27, I am obviously led to ask myself questions. régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues Thread by needle, I even manage to suspect her from having poisoned my father. I then put it on, until they obtain certainty from the contrary. A perfectly fictional episode. certainly, but which, despite everything, reveals something deep, a unsaid, a mystery-and it is among other things, literature: a buried mystery whose vibrations we feel in the foundations of a text.

“Talking about little-farm is perhaps just a process to hide me. I make her responsible for all that in myself I hate, “we can read in this novel. You are very hard with the maternal figure, but you will not save yourself either … Have you been revealed more than expected?

I always go all the way. You also had in your hands the first version of the book. where I delivered trivial details on my person – I will not take régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues them back here, because I cut them to densify the book. Yes, give it the density of a poem. This book is above all a kind of posthumous dialogue with my mother. Rather a monologue, moreover, since it is no longer there to answer me. This is the frame of the book. A reminiscence of what our relationships have been during his lifetime. During these language wanderings, I discover that in reality she exercised real power over me. Until the very end of her life – and she has reached the respectable age of 106 years. I even have the feeling that. from the dawn of my life, she gave me my roadmap, and that I followed her instructions.

Did your mother influence you as a writer?

His very imaginative way of lying about any matter. inventing births, deaths, tragic adventures by talking régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues about people whom I barely knew, or not at all, was completely romantic. Most often dramatic, even tragic stories. We have sometimes noticed my tendency to tell sinister stories – rather in my first books – I tell. myself that she had a direct influence on my writing. The end of “mom” is a kind of rise towards love, happiness. She is lyrical. In this part of the novel, I realize that love is always imperfect. We are accustomed to forgive your children whatever happens. I tell myself that when a mother loved you so much – even if her love was on the. occasion of betrayal – you have to pay tribute to her for all the good she did. Ultimately. it is thanks to her that I was born and it is better to exist than not having existed-it is the philosophical option which is mine, despite all régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues the misfortune of the world-that my children later could exist and that my granddaughter was born in turn. It is she who closes the book. I see myself in her place sixty and a few years earlier babbling like her in the sea. A loop, the impression of being part of a succession, of existing in time. With a capital letter as Proust wrote at the end of the research.

You have had some problems for having written on real people who did not welcome the literary approach very well – which becomes a classic of contemporary writing (Reinhardt. Carrère…). Was this book a way to turn the gun from the pistol against yourself?

No. As for the real people, I have never revealed anything about them who was not rehashed in the newspapers. My book on DSK remains condemned because the court. régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues the court of appeal judged that I defined him by recognizing that he had indeed sexually assaulted the maid of Sofitel in New York. Recently. for a completely different case, I told the president of the court that this judgment was shameful and that no one could today claim the opposite. It is agreed. Times have changed, I was a little in advance but, in the meantime, my book is still condemned. It was before #MeToo. The press, the publishers, everyone was at the time. I am not a little marquis of letters. Some writers accept, on behalf of their convictions, to take risks. In France, in 2025, there is no risk neither death nor prison. We risk censorship, on occasion. I assure you that we do not die. I am, obviously, far, far, to be the only French writer to have had a knit to leave with justice. At régis jauffret: “maman”, writer continues the same time as me, Christine Angot was also condemned for one of her books. To denounce rape is not love for darkness, it is a duty. Regarding DSK. I yelled before the pack of the righteous, few opportunists, and liars who did not change their minds but returned their jacket at the last moment so as not to stain it. It is not me who is dark, violent, it is reality. Sometimes.