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April 2025
OLI V I ER
SAI LLARD
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   « On my social networks, I practically only post pages of books. Books, and women’s faces, bodies, and skin. I like to share texts that are related to clothing. To unravel the relationship that a person weaves with a fabric. You can find the text that changed my life among these posts. It’s the first page of L’asphyxie, which means “asphyxia” in French, by novelist Violette Leduc.
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L'asphyxie, Violette LEDUC, 1946, 196 pages.
  I discovered this text about 20 years ago. I’m an avid reader, but I don’t usually read an author’s entire set of works or even reread a book that I really loved. However, I’ve read everything by Violette Leduc. 
 
   L'asphyxie is a text that has no base, no complacency. It bursts from within. A note. Her words seem to be pulled from inside her, and they spread out, despite her. In them, we find her angst, her ongoing personal conflict, her attempt to settle a score with her mother.  
Her writing was delectable to me. It was like Art Brut. 
  After all, I like tortured and depressed artists. They echo my own depression, the melancholy that might seep through my work. Nothing ever goes well for Violette Leduc. Nothing is ever very happy. L’asphyxie is a perfect example.
« She helped me step off and onto the curb by gripping the armhole of my clothing. It was humiliating. »
Excerpt from L'asphyxie, from Violette LEDUC,
published in 1946.
   On the first page of the book, Violette Leduc describes a scene that one might find banal or even laughable — a mother grabs her daughter by the sleeve, without touching her, to cross the street. In reality, this is incredibly violent. Violette Leduc was an illegitimate child. Her mother had her out of wedlock with a young man from a good family, who never recognized her as his own daughter. Her entire literary work is motivated by her mistaken place in the world. This struck a chord with me.
Just like Violette Leduc, I never ever had any physical contact with my mother.
   My mother had six children but rarely revealed a glimmer of maternal affection — although we didn’t suffer from it. We didn’t touch each other. Not with our clothing. Not with our skin. I have no memory of sitting on her lap. She came from a long line of strong women and was the oldest in her family. She was extremely caring but couldn’t show signs of affection. I did make attempts to get closer to her when I was a teenager, since I was the baby of the family. I started hugging her, teasing her, kissing her. It was nice.
   All my life, I found it extremely hard to be away from my mother. As if I was in love with her. I didn’t want her to slip out of my grasp. From age 10 to 18, I went to Scout camp every summer and winter. When it was time to go there, it broke my heart to leave her. I used to cry for days. Even though I’m the one who decided to go in the first place. Maybe this was a way of exteriorizing all the love I had for her but couldn’t physically express, twice a year.
« My mother saw my tears.
You want to get run over and now you’re crying!
She was the one running me over. » 
 
Excerpt from L'asphyxie, from Violette LEDUC,
published in 1946.
   It was my friend and partner Gaël Mamine who introduced me to Violette Leduc with Trésors à prendre, meaning “Treasures to take”, a kind of autobiographical travel narrative published in 1960. From a coach to a bus, from a provincial hotel to a roadside restaurant, she talks about her trip, which is really quite ordinary. This first encounter with her texts reminded me of my childhood. Vacation, highways, my parents who were broke, always scraping by. We slept in a hotel-restaurant near Toulon, just off a highway. There was constant noise, the smell of fig trees, the tomato salad that we thought was divine, the outdoor shower. Violette Leduc reminded me of all that. That’s the vacation I would like to relive, more than any other.
   When it came to autobiographies, Violette Leduc was a pioneer. In her books, she talks about her one-bedroom apartment on rue Paul Bert, which overlooked the trash bins. She lived on nothing. She was even – unbeknownst to her – kept by Beauvoir and Sartre, who secretly paid a sort of stipend to the Gallimard publishing house. Violette Leduc didn’t gain any success until she was 57, right before finding out that she had cancer. She lived in her room and created her art on a corner of a table.
« My mother never held my hand … »
 
Excerpt from L'asphyxie, from Violette LEDUC,
published in 1946.
   Maybe I’m so touched by this text because I’ve always dreamed of creating art on a corner of a table too. But writing is the only exercise that allows this. It is the roughest and most conceptual discipline: you need nothing to write. A notebook, your pen. And this bursting from within. »
— Olivier Saillard
 
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