Marie NDiaye, The Art of Fiction No. 268

Marie NDiaye On winning the Prix Goncourt, Paris, 2009. © Reuters.

Marie NDiaye, The Art of Fiction No. 268

Interviewed by Madeleine Schwartz

Issue 252, Summer 2025

Marie NDiaye’s books are often violent, but the violence takes highly particular forms. A person might find herself suddenly called a different name by everyone around her, like Fanny in Among Family (1990, translation 1997), or pregnant with a strange creature, as does Nadia in My Heart Hemmed In (2007, 2017). A lawyer might try to comprehend an act of infanticide; a woman working in a hotel might find herself in a sexual relationship with her boss, who has their encounters filmed. The shocking nature of such scenarios is offset by NDiaye’s prose, precise and formal, with a restraint that adds to her work’s unnerving quality: a placidity where one might expect horror. Claire Denis, with whom NDiaye wrote the screenplay for the film White Material (2009), has described her work as “unbearably sweet.”

In person, NDiaye is warm and gracious. She likes talking about babies, dinner parties, her friends’ books; she often wanted to know what I was reading, and to discuss movies she enjoyed, like Anatomy of a Fall and Mulholland Drive. That congeniality often seems like a kind of self-protection. NDiaye, whose popularity outside her home country is steadily growing, is one of France’s most famous writers. Her first novel was published in 1985, when she was seventeen; she has published twenty-nine books since. Her play Papa doit manger (Daddy’s got to eat), about a father’s unexpected return to the family he abandoned a decade earlier, was performed at the Comédie-Française in 2003, the first time the theater had produced work by a living female writer. In 2009, her novel Three Strong Women (translation 2012), the linked stories of a lawyer, a housemaid, and a schoolteacher, told between Senegal and France, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious book prize, catapulting her to a new tier of literary celebrity. This, combined with the fact that she is one of the few Black writers to have achieved mainstream success in France, means that she is often asked to weigh in on current events, but she bridles against the media’s tendency to turn novelists into pundits. “When⁠—especially during an election⁠—I read the opinion of some novelist or another, I think, Leave this person alone so they can write,” she told me. (Her brother, Pap Ndiaye, is France’s former minister of national education and youth and one of the country’s foremost historians.)

NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, to a white French mother and a Senegalese father who left the family when she was an infant, and was raised in the suburbs of Paris. She has spent most of her adult life away from the city⁠—for many years in rural areas of France and then in Berlin, where she lived with her then husband, the writer Jean-Yves Cendrey, and their three children. She now lives alone, in a bright apartment in the twelfth arrondissement. Our conversations took place over the course of a year and a half, during which time the living room, featuring at first just a yellow couch and chair, gradually filled⁠—with a map of the city, images of the sea, a tall red lamp, plants, exhibition catalogues, and books. Sometimes we were interrupted by a call about a furniture delivery. On the table was a vase that had been given to her by friends; she didn’t think it was her style, but liked that they had considered that it might be. The room has a view of a bookstore across the street. When I stopped by for a final visit, the store had a picture of NDiaye in its front window.

INTERVIEWER

Did one character in Ladivine (2013, 2016) come to you first?

MARIE NDIAYE

I’m not sure I can remember. Remind me who the main characters are again?

INTERVIEWER

There’s Ladivine, her daughter, Malinka, who renames herself Clarisse, and Clarisse’s daughter, also named Ladivine.

NDIAYE

And what was your question?

INTERVIEWER

The book is about a matriarchy, and I wondered if there was one woman around whom you built the others.

NDIAYE

Really, I don’t remember. It’s strange⁠—I’d say that I suffer from hypermnesia, although I try to avoid that word, when it comes to my own life. I remember every detail⁠—dates, what people wore … I have an extremely vivid memory of my own childhood. But with the books I write, I forget basically all their details. It’s like when you chat with someone on a train⁠—you forget about them when the trip is over.

INTERVIEWER

But surely you read each novel countless times, going through multiple drafts⁠—you never think about your characters once you’re finished with them?

NDIAYE

Never. That anecdote about Balzac, that just before his last breath he called for Doctor Bianchon⁠—I find it astonishing. I know I won’t call out for any of my characters on my deathbed.

In any case, I rarely go back over what I’ve written. There are no drafts. I revise very little.

INTERVIEWER

So how do you write?

NDIAYE

You mean literally?

INTERVIEWER

Yes. Do you have a ritual or routine?

NDIAYE

Well, I sit over there, at the table, or maybe in bed. Or not in bed, but on my bed. I don’t need an office, just my computer. It’s okay if I’m interrupted⁠—if the phone rings, say. It doesn’t bother me to be bothered. When the children were still little, I was interrupted all the time. Mostly, back then, I worked during their school hours, but I maintained a similar kind of discipline even after they left home. My working sessions have always been short, about two hours, so they must be two very productive hours. After that, I feel I can go no further.

INTERVIEWER

Because you get stuck?

NDIAYE

No, I’ve just gone as far as I can. I’ve never had that feeling of block, maybe because I spend so much time dreaming things up before I sit down to write. Only when the characters are refined enough in my mind can I put them into words. I generally enjoy chores like cleaning, cooking, shopping for groceries, because, while my hands are occupied, I can also entertain vague thoughts about my characters. Of course, there are also activities that don’t allow for that, because you have to concentrate on what you’re doing⁠—taking care of children, et cetera. But when I’m driving, for example, I can truly focus on both navigating⁠—if it’s a simple route⁠—and what I’m writing.

INTERVIEWER

Is the approach the same when you’re writing a play or a film versus a novel?

NDIAYE

There’s more dialogue with a play, of course. And all the plays I’ve written have been commissioned, which will generally involve some constraints⁠—it’ll be for three actors, say, who are twenty-five, forty-five, and seventy⁠—which gives the writing a path to follow. When I was writing for the actress Nicole Garcia, I liked that I could picture her face, hear in my mind the way she speaks, imagine the way she throws her hair back. With Saint Omer (2022), Alice Diop and Amrita David, who edits Alice’s films, came up with the idea to ask me to join them on their adventure. We met for two or three weeks, during which time we worked together every day in the producer’s office. I love movies, but I’m not that interested in writing scripts⁠—I find all that reviewing and revising a bit annoying. What interests me more is talking about the characters with other people, which is mostly what we did.

INTERVIEWER

Did you already know about the case of Fabienne Kabou, which inspired the film?

NDIAYE

Oh yes. Stories like that always fascinate me. I mean, a mother who seems to love her child, who seems to treat her well, who nourishes her, then kills her … It’s so impossible to fathom that it’s captivating. Working on the film, I read everything I could find about the mother, about the murder, about infanticide itself. She was truly sick, of course⁠—and the courts can’t adjudicate that kind of sickness. But she spoke very, very clearly. She was cold, glacial. She never apologized, never broke down. In the trial scene we wrote, there’s hardly a word said by that character that wasn’t said by the real woman. None of the dialogue is made-up, not what the lawyers say, or the judge, the president of the court … It’s almost at the level of documentary.

 

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With her brother, Pap, ca. 1972. Courtesy of Marie NDiaye.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think about good and evil?

NDIAYE

If I think about good and evil, it’s definitely without the capital letters. But I’m very interested in writing about goodness⁠—I’ve read a lot of the Bible, for instance. I’m not a believer, but the Gospels, and the figure of Jesus, have appealed to me since I was a child. In one of the last scenes in Vengeance Is Mine (2021, 2023), the protagonist, Maître Susane, is attacked by someone who takes her bag⁠—in my head, it’s really Jacob wrestling with the angel.

INTERVIEWER

What made you return to the subject of infanticide in Vengeance Is Mine?

NDIAYE

Well, the film wasn’t my idea, but it gave me the idea for the story, which I handled in my own way.

INTERVIEWER

Once you had the idea, how did you start the book? Do you tend to begin with a sentence, or perhaps a scene?

NDIAYE

Not a sentence or a scene so much as a vision, one that’s been scampering about my brain for several months. It begins vaguely, but as it becomes sharp, its presence signals that I should write about it, and this vision leads to the creation of a character who inhabits it and makes it believable. For Vengeance Is Mine, my vision was this⁠—there’s a woman in her office, and a man enters, and he’s distraught. I didn’t know what he was doing there, or who he was, but that image carried my imagination toward the story. I find the writing process to be generative in and of itself. I’m very often surprised by the routes it might take. I don’t go from point A to point B knowing exactly what will happen.

INTERVIEWER

So there’s no plan? I’m thinking of My Heart Hemmed In⁠—the couple alienated from their community without explanation, and the husband’s mysterious wound. It feels almost allegorical.

NDIAYE

I’d completely forgotten about the wound! I’m sure that must have been some kind of allegory⁠—but of what?

I do love parables, and how, compared to fables, which have a message⁠—that one must respect one’s parents or whatever⁠—they try to make us understand something essential about life, but without such explicit moralizing. I recently read John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. It’s an allegorical novel whose title references a version of this Babylonian tale. A servant returns from the market and says, Master, lend me your horse so I can go far away from here⁠— I saw Death in the marketplace. So the master lends the servant his horse, and the servant leaves the city. Then the master goes to the marketplace and sees Death and⁠—why am I telling this stupid story? Anyway, Death tells the master, I was astonished to see your servant here, for we have an appointment tonight in Samarra! Whatever we try to escape will invariably find us.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think there are some questions you can’t escape, that you keep returning to in your books?

NDIAYE

I think so, without wanting to. The family. Families in all that they are.

INTERVIEWER

Were you close with your family when you were growing up?

NDIAYE

Well, until I was ten or eleven, my brother, Pap, my mother, and I lived in very close proximity⁠—in an apartment of thirty square meters. It was in what would now be called the public projects in Fresnes, which is in the banlieues south of Paris. There was only one bedroom, so my mother and I shared a bed, and Pap slept on a cot in the same room. This felt perfectly normal at the time, of course, mostly because Pap and I spent most of our time outdoors. Pap is only twenty months older than me, but as a child I didn’t spend much time with him, because, in those days, friendships between children were extremely gendered. My friends were girls, his were boys.

As for my mother, we had the type of relationship that was common back then. She was a good mother. She’s not an expressive type⁠—she’s from a rural region in central France⁠—and there was very little physical contact or affection. But I had plenty of friends whose parents hit them, and my mother never hit me or Pap, never. Which is remarkable, actually, because she brought us up alone, and there were times when we were annoying. She didn’t have much money, and truly she did the best she could as a single mother of two mixed-race children⁠—both rare in those days⁠—while maintaining this reserve.

INTERVIEWER

Did you and Pap feel that you were different from other children? Were there other Black or mixed-race families in Fresnes?

NDIAYE

No, and we certainly knew we were the only nonwhites in our classes, in our building, et cetera, although that didn’t feel so significant, especially as we had relatively light skin. We were also always the smartest, the best-looking, all of that. But no one else in our primary school had a single mother, and there simply weren’t single mothers in Fresnes, other than widows⁠—who were, of course, quite respectable and dignified. It simply wasn’t an option to say our father had abandoned us when we were small, so I’d tell people at school that he worked abroad. Mother never said anything about him, and Pap and I never talked about him, even between ourselves.

INTERVIEWER

Were you ever in touch with him?

NDIAYE

No, I saw him no more than two or three times. He was a very cold, aloof man. Even when I went to visit him in Dakar when I was nineteen, I never saw his eyes, because he always wore dark glasses, even inside. I went out of curiosity, out of a desire to see his world, but there wasn’t the slightest possibility of forming a relationship with him. I know that he … Well, all that I know about him I learned much later.

INTERVIEWER

For the foreword to your brother’s book La condition noire, you wrote a short story about two sisters who are born to the same parents, but one looks white and the other Black. Their neighbor is convinced that this difference will change the course of their lives. Were you⁠—

NDIAYE

My brother and his editor asked me to write that. Honestly, I find this subject exhausting. I was in Rio last fall, and the question of being Black, and being a Black woman, seemed very urgent for everyone. And I understand that it’s an important issue for many people, but there’s a certain essentialist stance that some critics take when they see an author’s name or face. It’s particularly acute in America. Much more than in France, I’ve felt in the States this injunction to be Black, to have this identity as a Black woman. The history of Black people in the two countries is very different, of course, and it’s always felt weird to me⁠—for example, I’ve been asked if I feel close to Toni Morrison. Why Toni Morrison? In fact I feel much closer to Russell Banks.

INTERVIEWER

What sorts of books did you gravitate toward as a child?

NDIAYE

I read what I was assigned at school, but I also enjoyed making my own program. When my brother and I were little, my mother registered us at the library, and one of our greatest joys was going there each week to pick out books. It was no small feat physically, because the library was very far from where we lived, and my mother didn’t have a car, or even a license, so we walked everywhere. Getting groceries, too, was a whole ordeal⁠—especially carrying them all back home. It’s funny that it took so long for suitcases on wheels to be invented!

There was less of what we call YA back then, which was lucky in a way⁠—not that there aren’t some excellent books for kids and teenagers nowadays, but I was forced to borrow the easier classics at an early age⁠—Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant. At some point my mother kindly agreed to write a sort of exemption letter to the library, authorizing me to borrow from the adult section whenever I wanted, because at that time you had to be thirteen. Some of the things I read then I’d look down on a little now, but they played a big role in my development⁠—Pearl Buck, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Hector Malot’s Nobody’s Boy, Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. My first memory of experiencing a revelation from a book was while reading something that wasn’t so-called age-appropriate. I must have been ten, and my mother had borrowed them by Joyce Carol Oates from the library. It had an extraordinary impact on me.

 

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On the literary talk show Apostrophes to discuss her second novel, 1987. © Louis Monier, courtesy of Bridgeman Images.

INTERVIEWER

Some parents might worry that their child wouldn’t be ready for a book that talks about death and robbery and prostitution. You didn’t find it traumatizing?

NDIAYE

Oh, no! Reading beautiful books can’t be traumatizing. Seeing awful things can be⁠—but reading? I don’t believe in that at all.

INTERVIEWER

Do you remember a moment when you realized you wanted to write?

NDIAYE

Not particularly⁠—that would have been like thinking, I’ve realized that I want to play. Writing was one of the ways in which I played.

But here’s a subject that interests me⁠—stuttering. I’m curious whether I might have written as a child because I had a stutter. I don’t know if there are any glamorous disabilities, but there’s absolutely no glamour in a stutter. I’ve sometimes wished it could be accepted as simply another way of talking, like having an accent, but I understand that, when you’re talking to someone who has a stutter, you don’t know what to do with them⁠—whether to finish their sentence or … I don’t know if you know this, but the prime minister, François Bayrou, had a stutter.

INTERVIEWER

Yes.

NDIAYE

You knew that? When I heard his incoming speech, I noticed him using strategies to avoid it. It’s something that never leaves us.

INTERVIEWER

How did your stutter change things for you?

NDIAYE

Well, I didn’t answer the teacher’s questions in class. I tried to compensate by being a pretty girl, as if I were hiding it under a layer of makeup.

INTERVIEWER

Were you a good student?

NDIAYE

In primary school, I was a very good student, but I didn’t much like the rules. The teachers were quite elderly, so they belonged more to the fifties than to the seventies, with practices that were becoming outdated⁠—they’d hit us when we hadn’t done our homework, and the teacher would keep me in for recess and try to get me to hold my pencil correctly.

Then, when I was ten or eleven, my mother took out a loan and bought an apartment in a little building in Bourg-la-Reine, a leap into a life that was much less provincial, more bourgeois, although still not affluent. Socially speaking, it was an important step. Bourg-la-Reine had the RER, so I’d get on a train to Paris every weekend, and the move also meant that I was able to go to Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux⁠—one of the great historic schools around Paris, very beautiful, a half-hour walk from where we lived. The school was fantastic, although I didn’t do so well there. I wasn’t rebellious, I did what was asked of me, but I didn’t like it, I didn’t like sitting eight hours a day, listening to lectures. I was always itching to get going, to move, to walk, to write. I don’t think I could do it even now. My brother did brilliantly well, but it really just wasn’t for me.

INTERVIEWER

Was it understood that you’d go to university?

NDIAYE

Yes, and I enrolled at the Sorbonne Censier, which is in the fifth arrondissement, in the humanities. I was there for a few weeks, I believe. The writing assignments didn’t interest me at all, at all, at all. I don’t know if it’s still the case today, but in those days, most students who enrolled in the humanities simply hadn’t managed to get into the hypokhâgne, for the social sciences. They didn’t have much of a taste for literature. I think the fact that Quant au riche avenir (As for the rich future, 1985) had been published by then gave me the confidence to leave. I felt that it would be better to stay home and write my second book.

INTERVIEWER

How did you come to publish your first novel at seventeen?

NDIAYE

Well, I’d written novels for years, taking from everything I read. My aunt had given me a miniature typewriter, but my mother complained that it made too much noise, so I wrote by hand instead. I discovered Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, so I wrote a South American novel, and then I discovered Carson McCullers and wrote an American novel. I wrote a Russian novel, too, inspired by Anna Karenina. For the novel that became Quant au riche avenir, I think my inspirations were Henry James and Proust, who came to me as a revelation. It’s not his plots⁠—those stories about the Duchess of Guermantes or the Baron de Charlus all seemed terribly distant. But I adored how long his sentences are, his way of entering the psyches of his characters to the deepest level. I got the sense that nothing else goes as far into the mastery and beauty of language as one can in French. In any case, that novel was the first I found worthy of showing to anyone, the first presentable one. It was still an exercise, but less ridiculous than the others, and not quite as directly inspired by an author I liked. I typed it up on my little typewriter in the fall of 1984, then went to a print shop to photocopy it, and I took the copies to the offices of Minuit, Gallimard, and Éditions du Seuil. I didn’t think too much about it when I submitted it, and it didn’t seem like a miracle to me that it was acquired, although it was tremendous luck. Within twenty-four hours, Jérôme Lindon of Minuit had called my home and spoken to my mother⁠—I think at first he thought he was talking to me, and my mother didn’t know that I’d sent them a manuscript, but they figured it out. The next morning⁠—it was a Saturday, so we had class until noon⁠—he went to my school and waited for me. I was young and naive, so this all seemed perfectly normal to me. I received my standard rejections from the other two publishers when the book was going into final edits.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel a connection to the Minuit lineage?

NDIAYE

I hadn’t read a single book Minuit published, and I’d never encountered Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Sarraute, or Duras. Maybe I’d read about Duras in the news, because she’d just won the Prix Goncourt for The Lover. But the first time I read any of them was when I went to see Jérôme Lindon at his office and he gave me a stack of books. Looking back, I didn’t adhere to what we’d call the Minuit style⁠— that aloof, blank prose⁠—which is also why it was so remarkable that he took me on. But he knew how to appreciate things even if they were somewhat outside his sphere.

INTERVIEWER

How did you experience the critical reception to the book? I imagine it was a shock to have so many eyes on you suddenly.

NDIAYE

Actually, no⁠—there were some reviews, but this was before the internet. Jérôme Lindon could have very well said, I’m publishing this seventeen-year-old girl who’s still in high school, but he didn’t. I was invited to appear on Bernard Pivot’s program, Apostrophes, which was the prime literary show on television in those days, and I turned him down because I was too scared. Most editors would have insisted because it could help sales and all that, but Jérôme Lindon just told me to do what I felt like. I didn’t receive many letters, but I did get one from Jean-Yves [Cendrey]⁠—that’s how we met. It was the first letter he’d written to a writer, he said. We met soon after and moved in together quite quickly. I didn’t want to live with my mother any longer.

INTERVIEWER

Were you worried about how you’d support yourself?

NDIAYE

I was lucky that, after the book was published, I received a grant from the Centre National des Lettres⁠—perhaps three thousand francs. Jean-Yves and I went to live in La Rochelle and learned to get by. Then we went to Paris for two years, then Barcelona, and when I was twenty-one, I got a Villa Médici fellowship, so we were in Rome for two years. Then we moved to Normandy, and when Lorraine, our daughter, was born, we bought our first house there. It was a bit of a wreck, but we renovated it, sold it, then bought another, sold it … We had so many different houses, and the effort that went into each of them! Everything had to be redone. It wasn’t always easy, raising babies in houses without heating, but it gave us enough money to live off of, and we liked the work. I’d never lived in any kind of luxury, and I was prepared not to have much money, so it felt natural. I liked the idea of writing, then being pregnant, then fixing up an old house⁠—not having everything immediately, but doing everything, and not sacrificing the writing.

 

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In the Garonne Valley, France, 2001. © Renaud Monfourny.

 

INTERVIEWER

Did your early novels come easily?

NDIAYE

Mostly, yes. I already had my second novel, Comédie classique (Classical comedy, 1987), in my mind when I left university. What was difficult was that Jérôme Lindon rejected it. He was very, very hard on second books. It shocked me a bit, but unlike other Minuit authors⁠—who tended to leave his office distraught and depressed after he rejected theirs, saying they’d put their manuscripts in a drawer and write him a better one⁠—I was so young and ignorant that I decided to take mine elsewhere. Which is what I did⁠—I went to [Éditions] P.O.L, which published it, and then I returned to Minuit for the third.

INTERVIEWER

Did Jérôme Lindon give a reason?

NDIAYE

I think it was because the book was written as a single sentence⁠—I loved Oulipo back then, especially Georges Perec, who did something ten times more difficult, writing a book without an e, in French. It was over the top⁠—a way of compensating for the fact that I didn’t have much life experience to draw from. I was nineteen at the time. Writing a single-sentence book was, for me, a bit like the way I’ve used magic or fantasy as a sort of crutch, a means of resolving complex conflicts between characters⁠—simply because I was too young to understand their relationships. It was only with La sorcière (The witch, 1996), which I wrote when I was maybe twenty-seven, that I felt myself becoming a more mature writer. By then I couldn’t avoid the fact that I’d lived. Not that I’ve ever told myself, I’m going to write about having children. But those experiences inevitably got into my writing. And then, quite simply, I didn’t need the stylistic acrobatics anymore.

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about plot? That Time of Year (1994, 2020), for instance, starts as a detective story, but⁠—not to spoil it for everyone⁠—there’s very little resolution.

NDIAYE

Well, there was a time when I was reading a great many detective novels, and I often found myself disappointed and almost unable to finish them. I was more interested in how the mystery unspooled than in learning the murderer’s name. I tend to prefer books in which the bow isn’t perfectly tied but slightly undone. After all, our lives are full of secrets that will never be revealed, enigmas that will never be resolved.

INTERVIEWER

Was there something that drew you to write about the disappearance of a child?

NDIAYE

I don’t much like to psychologize, but I probably hold some sense of insecurity from the time I spent living with my mother, who had very little support. I used to be afraid that she would die, because then we would have been all alone. Not that it was a real fear⁠— there was never any reason she’d die⁠—but that doubtless played a role. When I started the book, Jean-Yves and I were still living in Normandy, in a village near Trouville-Deauville, a region very popular with Parisians and especially with British people, and what ultimately inspired me⁠—about the village, that is⁠—is that after vacation season, the town fell into a kind of slump. It was rather bleak. That is where our two sons were born. And after that, we moved near to Bordeaux, because there was this situation … We couldn’t stay. Did I already tell you this story? About the teacher who was a pedophile?

INTERVIEWER

No. What happened?

NDIAYE

Well, at that time, Jean-Yves was taking karate classes, and the karate teacher was also a mechanic. Jean-Yves asked this man if he would look at his car, and the next Sunday, when he brought his car over, Jean-Yves got to talking to his wife. I don’t know how it came up, but a priest had just been arrested in the next town over for raping little boys, and the wife said something to the effect of, Well, he’s not the only one who should be arrested⁠—there’s also that teacher Monsieur Lechien.

Now, Monsieur Lechien was our kids’ teacher, and he seemed really beloved at the school, very progressive in his methods⁠—he was the first to have a computer, in fact. The mechanic’s wife told Jean-Yves that their daughter had revealed that, when she was six, Monsieur Lechien had made her stay behind every recess and give him fellatio. Oh, the horror of it! The absolute horror. The girl, who was now fifteen, even came downstairs to corroborate the story. She told Jean-Yves that a friend of hers had been subjected to the same thing⁠—she’d told her parents, but they didn’t believe her. This was the late nineties, it seems crazy today. Jean-Yves and I became completely fixated on the whole thing, and meanwhile our children still had Marcel Lechien as a teacher.

My apologies, I don’t need to spend three hours telling this story … But in short, we learned that there were many, many young victims. Little boys, too. We wanted to write a letter to the public prosecutor’s office to report the allegations, but many of the parents involved felt that it was too long ago and that the psychological cost would be too great. So we came up with a plan. School drop-off was at nine in the morning, and at eight thirty, Jean-Yves waited as Marcel Lechien pulled in to park his car. Jean-Yves said, “Marcel, I have something to tell you in private. Will you get in my car?” He got in, and Jean-Yves said, “Marcel, listen. It’s over. I know what you did, and it’s over.”

Apparently, Marcel Lechien grew completely red. Red red. The only thing he said was, “Do my parents know?” He didn’t resist, they went to the police station, and that was that.

There was a trial, I believe three years later, with more than thirty plaintiffs. Many people couldn’t file their cases because they were outside the statute of limitations, but still there were farmers, men of thirty-five or forty, who testified. These weren’t people who got any pleasure from testifying⁠—these men, who generally didn’t talk much, who had never discussed any of this openly before, were in tears. The reason we eventually decided to leave was that it emerged that the principal and her colleagues had known things, too. Lechien was sentenced to fifteen years. It was an astonishing story.

I wrote a play about it, or around it⁠—Les grandes personnes (Grown-ups, 2011). The title comes from the fact that the judge had said something like, “Do you prefer being with children?” and this man, who was fifty-one years old at the time of the trial, said, “No, I also like to be with grown-ups.” Such a childlike expression⁠—in his head, he was a child. He’d been taught by Jesuit priests, apparently, and had had a difficult lot. Not that he talked about that in the trial⁠—in fact he denied everything.

INTERVIEWER

Didn’t Jean-Yves also write a book inspired by these events? Did you share your work with each other?

NDIAYE

Yes. Les jouets vivants (The living toys). In those days we were each other’s first readers, yes, and he’d give me feedback. I usually didn’t give him much⁠—just “Very nice,” things like that.

INTERVIEWER

Was that an easy dynamic?

NDIAYE

Well, generally I prefer not to impose my manuscripts on anyone. I always find it burdensome when someone says, Hey! Read all these pages I wrote and tell me what you think! It’s an awful thing to ask of someone⁠—it’s work to read, and to say what you think, and, even more, to know exactly how to say it. It’s not easy being a writer in a partnership with another writer⁠—especially when one person has more success and it’s obvious. It’s not so simple when men feel less than.

INTERVIEWER

Did prizes affect things for you⁠—the Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe (2001, 2004), the Goncourt for Three Strong Women?

NDIAYE

The Prix Femina not so much, but I was shocked by the Goncourt. When I started writing Three Strong Women, I still felt I was very much on the margins. I didn’t feel I was part of the literary world, and that suited me. I assumed that my style was a bit too difficult for my work to be recognized for that kind of prize. It was very flattering, and financially, it changed everything. My husband and I were able to buy a beautiful apartment in Berlin, which we sold, and thanks to that apartment, I get to live here.

INTERVIEWER

I think I read an interview in which you said that you’d left Paris for Berlin because you were sick of Sarkozy⁠—is that right?

NDIAYE

Not at all. We moved because Paris was too expensive, and because the children, who were ten, fourteen, and sixteen at that point, wanted a change. Berlin was a practical choice, because the French school in Berlin is one of the only ones in the world⁠—outside France, of course⁠—that’s free. I said a sentence or two about Sarkozy, offhand, two or three months before I won the Goncourt, and nothing happened at first, even when it appeared in print⁠—but after I won, this horrible ultra-right guy brought it up. If I could have imagined the proportions it would take on …

INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting that, when Three Strong Women came out, several critics in France felt that they weren’t strong enough.

NDIAYE

Perhaps because they heard puissant in the social sense of the word. I don’t know if you know the French journalist Léa Salamé, who hosted a show, Femmes puissantes, about women in power⁠—CEOs, professional athletes, socially successful women. To me puissant encompasses much more than that. It’s more abstract. Perhaps that’s why, in English, German, Italian, and Spanish, the translators chose words more like the French forte⁠—strong in English, stark in German. But that seemed a bit odd to me, of course, because a woman who is forte never doubts what she does, and holds together the family. And a woman who is forte might also have a rather round body …

INTERVIEWER

I was surprised to notice, when I reread the book, that at the end of two of the women’s stories, there are counterpoints from men who are close to them. Why give the last word in a woman’s story to a man?

NDIAYE

Oh, I don’t know. Those voices are remorseful, too⁠—they’re voices of regret. In any case, when we write novels, we can’t choose sides. We have to be on everyone’s side⁠—the woman’s, the man’s, the child’s. That’s what I find marvelous about novels, anyway⁠—that they allow us to hear everyone.

Really, the thread that connects the three women is less the psychology of these characters than the form. I was very inspired by Faulkner’s If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and I knew from the start that these stories would go together. There’s a link between the three characters, even if their time periods are different⁠—I recall there’s a moment in the first part when Norah meets Khady Demba, who’s working in Norah’s family house, and then we meet Khady again.

INTERVIEWER

That makes me think of a moment in Ladivine that really moved me⁠—when we’re looking at Clarisse and then suddenly we see her through her daughter’s eyes, from the outside. It’s almost as if we’re seeing two different women.

NDIAYE

I’ve always been interested in those moments when our parents shock us. My children saw a completely different side of me, for instance, when I left their father a few years ago. They no longer saw me as one branching head of the single body that makes up the parental unit, but as an individual.

INTERVIEWER

Do your children read your books?

NDIAYE

Very, very discreetly. And I never ask them about it. I imagine it could be a bit troubling to read them, because I believe I was, at the very least, an ordinary mother, not an unusual one. Reading the books of an ordinary mother might reveal that there’s an unfamiliar side to her.

INTERVIEWER

Some critics read Norah biographically, as a stand-in for you.

NDIAYE

It’s true that my father’s house in Senegal resembled the one in Three Strong Women, so there’s a certain autobiographical element⁠—but it was just a starting point, like when you write something that begins with a dream you had. I never write autobiography, really. I wrote Self-Portrait in Green (2005, 2014) in response to a request from Colette Fellous to write a more autobiographical story, but I cheated. For example, the “I” has five children, I think⁠—more than I have. There are parts that are true⁠—the flooding of the Garonne is based on the flooding of the Rhône, for instance⁠—but the “I” isn’t me. I’d never write a memoir. It would disturb my private life too much, and it doesn’t interest me. I’ve never kept a diary. I’ve never wanted to talk about myself in the most truthful way possible.

INTERVIEWER

When you wrote The Cheffe (2016, 2019), were you thinking about your own artistic journey?

NDIAYE

I suppose that character was a way of exploring what it is when one’s life is one’s art. But her extreme asceticism, the way she rejects whatever doesn’t serve her art⁠—that’s not me at all. I don’t know if it’s obvious from reading that book, but I hate the Cheffe’s intensity⁠—the way, for instance, she astounds the family she works for, laying out meals for them that they have absolutely no way to appreciate, or even to comprehend. And her intensity makes her totally unreliable, or at least means she can’t operate at her highest level. I hate all fanaticism, actually. What I aspire to in my own life is a certain kind of harmony. I don’t subscribe to the idea that we’d write better in a cave, alone⁠—quite the opposite. When it comes to writing, one has to live as much as one can.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have your readers in mind as you write?

NDIAYE

I write because I have to. I can’t tell myself that I’m doing something to elicit the reader’s enjoyment⁠—that would be almost obscene to me.

INTERVIEWER

What are you drawn to, as a reader?

NDIAYE

When I get interested in either a subject matter, an author, or a story, I try to find everything I can on it. For me, reading has always been one of the great pleasures of life, but it’s also a form of work. I struggle with histories and works of philosophy, but I force myself to try to read them just to make my brain work at something that doesn’t come naturally. The only thing I can’t read are books that are too commercial, although I do love the work of Stephen King⁠—the stuff from thirty or forty years ago. His books resemble nothing else. They’re completely crazy, in fact. It could be said that they’re the work of a sick imagination, but one that resonates with a mind like mine.

INTERVIEWER

Are there some books you read for work and others for pleasure?

NDIAYE

There are certain books where something about the rhythm of their language spurs me to write. Sometimes it’s enough to read just a page of Claude Simon, or of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. I open them at random. And I read snippets of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish” all the time⁠—there’s something about the way it evokes the memory of his mother, how he talks about her body and how he often hated her, the ways in which she wasn’t, in his eyes, a good mother to him. The poem laments his mother, who wasn’t all that great, and who isn’t here anymore. It’s cruel and tender. With Javier Marías, it’s always the first page of A Heart So White. Have you read it? It begins with a group of Madrid’s intelligentsia, who are in the midst of a decadent lunch when suddenly the sound of a gunshot rings through the host’s apartment, so everyone rushes to the site of the sound, the bathroom, and sees that the host’s daughter has been killed from a bullet through the heart. There’s this detail⁠—the kind of detail I adore in Marías’s novels⁠— that as the father discovers his daughter dead on the floor he still has a bit of meat in his mouth, which he’d been chewing on, and he doesn’t know what to do with this piece of meat, this mouthful. Should he continue to chew, and swallow it? Spitting it out in the presence of his dead daughter wouldn’t do, either. That’s how life is. There’s drama and there’s the folly of a piece of meat still in your mouth, and who knows what to do with the two together?

INTERVIEWER

Can I ask you an entirely unjournalistic question?

NDIAYE

Of course.

INTERVIEWER

Your bookshelves seem so solid … I’ve been looking for some like that.

NDIAYE

So, I found these ones on a street corner. For the others, I bought these boards, and used stacks of my books in translation to hold up each shelf. I love the way they look⁠—not too crowded. A friend told me it’s important not to pack too much on, because you risk it collapsing.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a character in Howards End who’s killed by a falling bookshelf.

NDIAYE

Oh really? I adore E. M. Forster. But, honestly, I don’t believe a falling bookshelf could really kill you. I’d think it might injure you, maybe give you some bruises⁠—but death? That seems a bit over the top.

 


Interview transcripts translated from the French by Pauline Cochran and Madison Beauchamp Sanubari


Link: theparisreview