The Mother of Us All doesn’t laugh, she barks. A cute little yap, like a puppy that’s happy and doesn’t mind showing it. Her eyes crease, she reveals teeth that are perfectly white in spite of a heavy cigarette habit, and she throws back her head like a child abandoning herself to pleasure. I love to hear her laugh and she adores laughing, so together we’re like a pair of idiotic clowns, a little suspect in the eyes of other people who don’t always understand what we find so funny. I also have to admit that nothing’s sacred when the two of us get together: absolutely nothing and no one finds favour in our eyes. Beginning with ourselves. When something’s bothering her she comes to me and laughs about it and I do the same when I feel an attack of the glooms. It’s a form of therapy with the great advantage of being absolutely free. It can happen that the real laugh, the one that delivers you and brings tears to your eyes, keeps you waiting until you despair of its ever coming at all—which happens more often to me than to her because I’m more high-strung—but it always arrives in the end, nudging our sense of the absurd and soothing heavy hearts. Her name is Marie-Hélène but we call her Mélène, the nickname her family gave her when she was little, or “the Mother of Us All,” an expression we made up one night when we were partying and she’d taken it upon herself to solve everybody’s problems. Everybody—and I’ll have more to say about that later—is the group of women I’ve been hanging around with for years now, my only true friends, my sisters; we’re a family we’ve put together ourselves from scratch, one in which each member has a particular role to play though none of it’s taken too seriously, an oasis of peace in the midst of our turbulent lives, a refuge that over the years has become essential to us all because it’s based on specific needs. For some, it replaces a family life they’ve never had, for me it takes over from a perfectly ordinary childhood. You can laugh if you want, but it’s wonderful to be able to relive part of your childhood in your late thirties.

So I was the only man in a group of lesbians.