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Chere Madame Ma Fille Cadette
Paperback
Series: La Bleue
ISBN13: 9782234065185
Publisher: Stock
Published: May 18 2011
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.59
Height: 0.49 Width: 5.32 Depth: 8.47
Language: French
DEAR MADAM MY YOUNGER DAUGHTER
My father was a playwright. Apart from that, no one can truly say who he was: famous and unknown, poor and rich, sinister and playful, idle and overworked, triumphant and pitiful, humble and bragging, good and very evil, passive and violently revolutionary, gentle and aggressive, funny and depressing, full of love and sometimes spiteful...
Through relentless privacy and secrecy, he managed to cover his tracks even in the multifarious and unclassifiable body of work he left behind.
So it is still only a fragment of the man that we find in that work: the man who, confronted with my own struggles with life when I was aged eleven to twenty, was driven to write to me at night, while under the same roof as me, and to leave his letters under the hairbrush in the bathroom before dawn - and he was a man of other letters too...
At the time, he himself was not very well. But, when you're busy growing up, do you notice a father's every season? When he started to fall silent - in the sense of an author's silence - it so happens that I started to write... I swear I didn't know what I was doing. What happened then for me, between the ages of eleven and twenty, set at a low volume to a tune of fate, was an incomprehensible sleight of hand.
Marie Billetdoux
Éditions Stock are publishing new editions of Marie Billetdoux's work. Dear Madam My Younger Daughter is one of her novels published before 2006, under the first name Raphaële. It is about her father, the playwright François Billetdoux and, more generally, about the very distinctive relationship between a father and his daughter, particularly when writing is involved.
Marie Billetdoux is best known for her work under the name Raphaële Billetdoux: Prends garde à la douceur des choses (Prix Interallié, 1976), My Nights are More Wonderful than Your Days (Prix Renaudot 1985) and Dear Madam My Younger Daughter (1997).
In 2006 she took the name Marie and published Un peu de désir sinon je meurs, then C'est fou, une fille (2007) and C'est encore moi qui vous écris, published by Stock in 2010.
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