Gallimard W ou le souvenir d'enfance

I have no childhood memories. Until about my twelfth year, my story can be summarized in a few lines: I lost my father at four, my mother at six; I spent the war in various penions in Villard-de-Lans. In 1945, my father's sister and her husband adopted me. This absence of history reassured me for a long time: its objective dryness, its apparent evidence, its innocence, protected me, but what did they protect me from, if not precisely from my history, from my lived history, from my real history? , of my own story which, one can assume, was neither dry, nor objective, nor apparently obvious, nor obviously innocent? “I have no childhood memories”: I made this statement with confidence, almost with a sort of challenge. There was no need to question me on this question. She was not enrolled in my program. I was exempt: another story, the Great, History with its great axe, had already answered for me: the war, the camps. At thirteen, I invented, told and drew a story.