Editions Verdier. January 12th, 2023.
The story opens with the narrator’s childhood, a hole that no one suspects, dug by the announcement of his grandmother’s death. He is five years old. Everything that precedes this first mourning seems to be erased from his memory until he himself, much later, experiences a serious illness. One day, while rereading the writings of Thérèse of Lisieux, an unknown corner of (his) great inner aviary is revealed to him. And it is in a dialogue with the saint that the narrator gathers the traces of the past, these buried emotions, sufferings and unanswered questions, this abandonment and this neglect where one believes oneself to be and that no one comes to appease, the anonymous extinction of our most intimate, of this most human which disappears faster than the scattered flesh.
Without being a believer, Patrick Autréaux wonders about the meaning of a vocation, mystical or literary, about the metamorphoses of the body, about what is transmitted to our unwilling body, about the future of the writer, with the emotion at the edge of the line and the rigor in the formulation which characterize his writing.
The Saint of the family is meant to jumpstart a new cycle in my writing, titled Constat (Report)