I was in shock, and I think I remained in shock for a long time while I came slowly to understand just how definitively sundered I was from my former life. How lost, now, all those days and years were that preceded Sylvie’s arrival. That period of my life was gradually becoming mythological. Or at least, it might seem like that to her, I thought, when she’s old enough to imagine it.

Parents are only there to be memories for their children, Matthew McConaughey says at the beginning of Interstellar, a very frustrating film that’s more or less forgotten now, and which I liked a lot for about an hour and a half when I saw it with Sylvie’s mother, Sarah, a few days before Sylvie was born. In one scene, McConaughey leads his team of astronauts to an unknown water-covered planet, where they are hoping to find news of an earlier, doomed mission. And indeed, not far from where they land, the crashed remains of that first spaceship are soon found bobbing in the ocean, still surprisingly intact despite the many years that separate the two expeditions. Due to some sort of trick involving complicated physics and wormholes, a few simple moments on this watery planet are equivalent to a whole year on earth. Though it’s taken them years to reach him, the first astronaut would have landed and died only hours earlier. Disaster quickly ensues. The mountains, which can be seen on the horizon, suddenly begin to approach. But they are not mountains. It’s a giant wave that’s been building for miles and which nearly kills them all, thrashing the spaceship and flooding its engine. Delayed in his return to the mothership, which is parked in space somewhere on the other side of the wormhole, McConaughey arrives back to find that years have passed. On earth, his children have grown up. In little more than an hour, he has become, for them, just a distant memory.

My own daughter will remember certain things about me, I thought as we left the cinema that night. She will remember things that haven’t even happened yet, but what will my previous life mean to her? All those moments up until now? And what about my own father’s life before I was born? Where did that all go? How little remained of that, besides a few unreliable anecdotes and a box of discoloured photographs with their vague aura of recklessness. So little, and less with each day.