Conference - Les Conversations Engagées d'Agnès host Sarah Chiche

"Writing is the essential purpose of my existence," explains the enigmatic Sarah Chiche, who adds: "I'm a writer and a psychoanalyst, not the other way round," since the desire to write began when she was nine years old. A vow to write, or rather, a secret promise to the Father. A father who died when she was fifteen months old. An "unrepresented" father, because at that age there are no memories. But a beloved father, because "you don't have to know to love", she says. Certainly not. Nor is it necessary to know in order to imagine. In other words, to put images where there were none. A direct entry into the writing of trauma, the only one worth having, the nerve of War. To life, against death. Essential writing. A magnificent book. In six books (L'inachevée, Les enténébrés, Saturne...) and three essays (including Une histoire érotique de la psychanalyse ), Sarah Chiche traces an incandescent line in the French literary landscape. She works with her own material, her family history, and draws on the world around her, but also on her masters, the great figures of psychoanalysis, especially not the self-help gurus she loathes. Her story, eminently romantic, begins in Algeria, where Emile, the father of her father Harry and her uncle Armand, was born. A patriarch at the head of a medical empire he had to abandon at the time of the war and rebuild in France. A story of a dissident son (Harry). Of an unwanted daughter-in-law (his mother Eve). A story of fragility, but also of cowardice, selfishness and predetermined paths that crush entire lives. And yet Love. Love as an injunction. Loving as rebellion. To love rather than to be loved. Aimer as a plea for Life, the luminous outcome of this mature book. No more darkness. Sarah Chiche, serious face and luxuriant hair. Confirmed seriousness but unbridled fun. Almost fifty. Next May 21st. Sarah Chiche, the only writer who doesn't smile when she's a guest on La Grande Librairie, but listens to the host as you'd expect her to listen to her patients, i.e. with that benevolent neutrality typical of shrinks.