Incipit

Life is a divan on which all our dead people are couched. This one has been lying here since 2016. The father. He died on March 31st, right on the threshold of the new coming month. He didn’t outlive March, instead, he remained on the verge of the spring my name produces.

For twenty years I signed my published books with the name Lorette. Then I discovered the truth about my original first name, Laurence. I used it for the first time to sign the book that was quite naturally titled “Lorette”.

In a clear though brief way, I testified of the reasons that has led me to put on a mask while moving forward for so many years. And I testified of the grace that now befalls me as long as I am bedazzled by my name, separated from that incestuous family who taught me how incestuous in essence all families are. However some pretty much more than others.

The book came out/was issued in bookstores on the 6th. I buried the father on the 7th. Precisely at the moment I was taking back my name, my identity and my destiny, he withdrew from the world and yielded room enough for my letters to be put in order and for truth to be revealed. Retrospectively, it seemed to me we could no longer dwell on the same planet, now that I manifested myself amidst such truth and following such order.

Back cover

In this collection, nine novelists tackle what the “divan” evokes to them through romantic fiction, auto-fiction or testimony. None is a psychoanalyst. Some are inspired by their own experience, others from that of a relative. Once the reader has surpassed surprise, he shall add his interpretation. Each narrator, in their own style, goes beyond clichés and tries to capture what it is like to experience something intimate in nowadays’ world. These are the enigmas of the body that the speaking being encounters and tries to solve through language. What is the peculiar path that a subject can take to respond to the mystery of the speaking body?

This book does not provide a general solution to life’s dead ends, and its unprecedented dimension lies in a question: what are the remedies when suddenly the encounter with the abyss plunges us into deep solitude?