Memory
by Philippe Grimbert

List Price: $10.00
Pages: 176
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9781416560005
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Philippe Grimbert is a psychoanalyst. He is the author of several works of non-fiction and a novel, Paul’s Little Dress. Memory (published in the UK as Secret) was awarded two of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, voted for by readers--the Prix des Lectrices d'Elle and the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens--as well as the Prix Wizo, for the best work of Jewish interest in French literature. He lives in Paris. Translator Bio: Polly McLean grew up in Paris and Oxford. Previous translations include Solibor, by Jean Molla, and Lobster, by Guillaume Lecasble.

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Q: The story depicted in Memory so closely resembles your own --- why did you choose to call it a novel rather than a memoir?

PG: I had no choice! My family history contained so many gaps that the novel (my favorite genre) was the only possible way of overcoming them. If I had been a historian, I would doubtless have chosen another way to explore this secret. And, paradoxically, creating a novel gave me an intimate sense of having re-established the truth of this personal, familial journey.


Q: Constructing the narrative of a once-secret past seems to serve an important therapeutic function for the fictional Philippe. Was the process of writing this novel similarly therapeutic for you? How do you understand the relationship between writing and psychoanalysis?

PG: The narrator of Memory does take a journey that one could describe as therapeutic, in so far as he exorcises the ghosts of the past in order to become a proper adult subject, released from a guilt that didn’t belong to him but whose weight he was nonetheless carrying. For me personally, it was not the writing of the novel itself that was therapeutic, but the psychoanalytic journey that I undertook as part of my training. My own analysis gave me the opportunity to consign my family history to its proper place, which is probably what allowed me, many years later, to write it with the necessary detachment. My work as a psychoanalyst enriches my writing on a daily basis --- not by drawing on my patients’ stories (which I would never allow myself to do), but rather because it familiarizes me with the complexities of the human psyche, and the conflicts and contradictions within all of us.


Q: Were there any parts of your own personal story that you omitted from this work? Any that you changed? If so, why?

PG: I left certain episodes from my own life out of the novel, not out of prudery but because I had come to the conclusion that they weren’t necessary to the story I was attempting to construct. Other personal experiences had to be transformed, or subjected to the demands of the narrative: I whittled them down, sometimes drawing together into a single event experiences which had developed in a much more gradual, or less spectacular way.


Q: What was your experience writing this book? Were certain parts of the story easier or more difficult to tell?

PG: It may seem strange for me to say that I enjoyed writing this book, and yet that’s the truth: I was finally becoming the master of a story of which I had for so long been the dupe. The narrative was the easier part --- my real struggles were with the construction, the architecture of the story, the way it moves around in time, the passages of idealized versus real history.


Q: In the novel you describe different stages of uncovering the past: the discovery of the toy dog, Louise’s confessions, and years later an investigation into Hannah and Simon’s ultimate fate. Do you feel that you now know the whole story?

PG: There will always be a secret component to this revealed secret, which I often compare to the Russian dolls that are nested inside each other: the final, smallest one always disappoints the child who tries in vain to open it. I think I have discovered the truth of this story more than its reality, but in any case, this psychological truth was more important to me than the historical reality.


Q: How closely do Maxime and Tania resemble your real parents?

PG: Maxime and Tania resemble my real parents in terms of their journey, their quandary, and the way they fight against their family backgrounds. On the other hand, although they were indeed physically handsome and athletic, my real parents were not as preoccupied by their bodies and appearances as I have created them: that was a novelistic impulse which attracted me because of the way their inordinate passion for sport brought them together, as "stadium gods" who actually embodied the physical ideal of their persecutors --- an ambiguity that on a literary level I found both rich and disturbing.


Q: Memory moves back and forth between the past and the present, the narrator’s real life and his imagined one. Why did you structure the book this way?

PG: I constructed the novel around alternating real and imagined passages because that was exactly how I constructed myself --- which is in fact coherent with what Freud calls the "family romance," constructed at a certain point by every child, about his or her parents’ history.


Q: What do you like to read? Who are some of your favorite authors, why? Can you pick any one of them as being an inspiration for your works?

PG: My taste in literature is very classical --- Flaubert, Balzac, the great writers of the nineteenth century (which seems to me the golden age of the novel). In contemporary fiction, I am particularly fond of authors such Albert Cohen, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano, and Erri De Lucca. Those who have served as models for me are those whose work is the most limpid, the subtlest.


Q: What are you working on now?

PG: At the moment I am working on a new novel because, having written numerous articles on psychoanalysis, the joy I have discovered in writing novels seems to me unique! I am also finishing two adaptations for the theater --- my first novel, La petite robe de Paul, and a new adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary.





© Copyright 2012 by Philippe Grimbert. Reprinted with permission by Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

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