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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Lydie Salvayre

Lydie_Salvayre 2014 ActuaLitté (Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0).jpg
Lydie Salvayre at the 2014 Livre sur la Place (Photo ActuaLitté, via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)

Lydie Salvayre was born Lydie Arjona in 1948 to Spanish parents exiled to the South of France to escape the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime. Salvayre returned to this period in her novel Pas pleurer (2014), for which she was awarded the Prix Goncourt. Hoping that they would return to Spain, her parents lived amongst a community of Spanish refugees having very little contact with their French neighbours. Salvayre’s father, though growing up among the bourgeoisie, was forced to engage in manual labour, while her mother would sew clothes to make ends meet. Growing up between two languages, for Salvayre, French was the language of books, of school, of perfect grammar, of order, while Spanish was the language of home, of community, of jokes, of the intimate realm. In her novels, these two ways of writing or conceiving the self compete and are often in tension.

After completing a degree in literature, Salyvare went on to study medicine and psychiatry. In 1979, she defended her thesis already showing a deep concern for, and kinship with, the literary – 'La Perversion: approche timide à partir du texte de Georges Bataille "La tragédie de Gilles de Rais"’ – at the Medical School of Aix-Marseille University, France. For a long time, she practised psychiatry (specializing in paediatric psychiatry) and would write in her free time. She was director of the Centre médico-psycho-pédagogique in Bagnolet, a suburb of Paris, where she would see children and adolescents in consultation.

Salvayre started publishing novels in her forties, the first, La Déclaration (1990), was awarded the Prix Hermès du premier roman. In 1997, she won the Prix Novembre (now Prix Décembre) for her novel La Compagnie des spectres (1997), which retells the story of a mother and daughter who need to come to terms with the period of the Occupation, while facing the threat of eviction.

In 1990, she met Bernard Wallet (founder of the publishing house Les Éditions Verticales) who would become her domestic partner. In her novel, BW (2009), she fictionalized his decision, following an accident, to leave the world of publishing, through a character sharing his initials.Shortly after the announcement of her being awarded the Goncourt Prize on 5 November 2014, Salvayre revealed that she was undergoing treatment for cancer, though she noted that the jury was unaware of her medical condition. She also remarked (in an interview with Marc-Olivier Fogiel for RTL on 10 November 2015) that her next novel would not deal with this question as she would be ‘too afraid of falling into pathos’. On 17 July 2015, she was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Nevertheless, in Tout homme est une nuit (2017), we end up following a man who, because of a cancer diagnosis, abandons everything, moves to a small village in the south of France, and becomes “'he stranger'. As Jérôme Garcin notes in his critique (Bibliobs, 2 November 2017): ‘On est ému par la manière délicate et pudique avec laquelle la romancière se glisse dans le récit de son frère d’armes, dont elle partage le courage, la droiture, les lectures et la conviction que “les maladies très graves vous obligent à faire, de votre vivant, le deuil de vous-même”’.

Compiled by Sonja Stojanovic (Notre Dame, IN)