With Borrowed Beds, Lily Pinsonneault wrote the book she would have liked to hold on to during the worst of her heartbreak.
Lily Pinsonneault would have liked to have in her hands a book which tells of a heartbreak, but which refrains from promising its readers that everything will pass in the end. Because there is nothing less soothing than being told, by those who have already stayed there, that we always come back from the land of other people’s mourning.
“I’m in a hurry to write because I have the impression that if I start at a time when this whole situation will make sense, this book will make less sense,” she announces in the first page of her third title, Borrowed Beds, the story of her breakup with Raph, a boy she still loved, and who loved her too, but who did not see the future in the same way as she did .
Lily Pinsonneault could, however, have offered a luminous ending to her book. Moment of hesitation when your journalist arrives at the café. If the young woman on whom The Borrowed Beds closes is no longer overcome by pain, she is still in suspense, waiting for the first day of the rest of her life.
While at a glance it becomes clear that what today’s Lily is waiting for is a child! Wonderful news, which however complicates a little the after-sales service of this book which takes the gamble of refusing the overly deliberately radiant conclusion.
“I could have written it that now I’m pregnant and in love with another guy, but in the book I didn’t want it to end with a nice moral, because it’s easy to suffer when you know that your suffering has an end”, explains in an interview the author of Except that I said nothing (2017) and No hurry (2019).
“What makes it painful, a heartbreak, is that you don’t know when it’s going to end. This is what gets scary. »
During the first weeks, friends will rush to her bedside to make sure she doesn’t get too sad. Then all this beautiful solicitude will be followed by invitations, more or less explicit, to dry her tears, my sister, in other words, to come back. The problem was, Lily didn’t want to come back from it. And that no one has ever stopped crying after being told that everything would be better if they stopped crying.
Would we have any discomfort welcoming the sadness of others, especially when it is part of the ordinary human experience? “I felt it, the social pressure to turn the page,” replies Lily. “OK, get over it, it’s just your ex.” We minimize the sadness that a breakup can cause. I have a friend who says: “Hey, heartbreak isn’t like the flu, you don’t get over it overnight by drinking lots of water.” She adds: “And even the flu…some people die from it.” »
Fortunately, she did not die. At 34, Lily Pinsonneault adds a new title to a work which, since its beginnings, combines intensity and lightness, drama and self-deprecation, poetry and everydayness, while using a lively and pleasant language, as close as possible to orality. A language giving the illusion of flowing naturally, although it requires, as you might have guessed, the greatest care.
But because it is about the lives of young women, Lily Pinsonneault’s work has sometimes been taken down, she regrets. “It’s as if people imagine that I haven’t thought about all the parameters of my story, whereas my books, I develop them, I think about them. »
Rather than exacerbating the small part of fiction that she infused into her novels, she chose to abandon it and embrace here what some have criticized her for, by constructing her manuscript from pages written first for her -even, in the heart of the storm.
All in? Lily admits to having reread her manuscript with the slight shame of revealing everything immoderate and potentially laughable about her interior monologue, a disinhibition which in reality gives her book all its dizzying force.
“Hey, it’s fine, Raph, but in the book, I’m so swooning! » She blushes, puts both hands on each of her cheeks. “But that’s what I thought at the time and I decided to take responsibility, even though I came to the other side of the force and I know now that we eventually get through it. » She will soon have a baby in her arms to prove it.
Sorry for the happy ending.
