~ The Margot Affair, by Sanaë Lemoine ~
It is said that the French have more relaxed sexual attitudes than the uptight Brits and Americans. Indeed, French presidents Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande have all had multiple affairs with various levels of public exposure that did not dent their political ascents. With some of these affairs, there were also children — entire families that had lives parallel to the politician’s public family.
In her fictional debut novel The Margot Affair, Sanaë Lemoine focuses on Margot, the child of an affair between Anouk Louve, an actress, and Bertrand Lapierre, a rising politician. Like Mitterand’s, this is a longtime affair, starting years before Margot’s birth and continuing into her teens when the novel is set. Mitterand’s two families were aware of each other, he split his holidays between them, and they stood together at his funeral. But Anouk and Margot are a secret to Bertrand’s wife and children and to the world. Margot sees it this way:
No one but the two of us could understand what it meant to be the hidden ones. His secret. […] And because we felt loved and special, we endured. He was married with two children, and yet he had sought pleasure and family elsewhere. There had been a hole in his life that needed filling. For years we had made him whole. That’s who we were, and I drew comfort from this.
Margot and her mother Anouk have lived together, by themselves, all their lives, but they are not emotionally close. Margot is used to her mother’s fame and emotional distance.
When we were alone, she’d look at me with a serious expression and say: We have to cut the cord. Too much affection is the greatest handicap. [..] A mother is not a friend. […] Those who didn’t know us well thought we were alike — that I, too, would become an actor one day. They thought it was the kind of profession you acquired from your parent the way one writer engenders another writer. But I had half her physical grace, my voice had never carried the same musicality or appeal, and I didn’t attract the stares of men on the street the way she did.
At 17, she begins to question the way they have lived for years, and longs for her father to live with them always, instead of seeing him only on his occasional surreptitious visits. Her father is now the Minister of Culture, and therefore more in the news. She meets a journalist at one of her mother’s shows, and spills the beans about her parentage. After the news breaks in the press, suddenly all of them are in the public eye.
This is not a hurried book. There are no immediate repercussions, but the ground starts shifting. A dramatic event at the end of Part 1 causes further turmoil, but again, not at all melodramatic. Margot gets closer to the journalist, David, and his wife Brigitte — a developing relationship with trouble written all over it.
Margot is analytical, but also immature, and during the course of the novel she faces abandonment, betrayal, and tragedy. She is sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, sometimes resentful, and sometimes resigned. The focus is very much on the teenager and her internal monologue, her (sometimes poorly-thought-out) decisions, her thoughts about her mother, their relationship and her growing understanding of the people around her. The subsidiary characters are well developed, but are viewed entirely through Margot’s eyes: her mother’s friends Mathilde and Theo who have provided stability all her life, her own friend Juliette who has an affectionate relationship with her own mother . And then there are David and Brigitte, whose relationship fascinates Margot as she grows into her own sexuality.
This is not a translated novel, but it almost feels like one, in the way French culture and the streets of Paris are integral to the book.
It has also been said that Frenchwomen don’t get fat. Lemoine pulls back the curtain on the religious dedication that it takes for her characters to achieve that slenderness. For example:
You will be a fat girl if you eat too much, her mother told Brigitte as she gave her cotton balls soaked in water to quell her pangs of hunger. She weighed her daughter every morning before breakfast. Brigitte had been taught at a young age that beauty and slenderness were necessary qualities for a woman to succeed. The gnawing feeling of your organs eating themselves from starvation was a good sensation.
Margot, too, is complimented when she loses weight from anxiety, and commented on when she puts on even a few pounds.
The author has a career as a food writer, and without anything as obvious as having recipes in each chapter, food is lightly, occasionally but lovingly woven into the novel. I imagined the author, very gently, wanting to nudge the readers into an appreciation of food for its own sake, and away from the anxiety about women’s weight.
For dinner Mathilde made a tomato tart with fennel salad. She had bought the tomatoes at the market and they spilled juice onto the cutting board as she sliced them open. She always made her own crust and shaped it like a true patissier, leveling off the edges until it was flush against the mold. Beneath the tomatoes, she added a layer of parsley pesto and grated cheese. I helped her pick fennel fronds for the salad.
I made the Smitten Kitchen version of the tart, and it was delicious, although mine was not quite as pretty. I recommend both the tart and this very unusual coming-of-age novel.
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