11

Patrick finished speaking. He’d told me a great deal and I thanked him. After that, there was another silence. Who would narrate the next chapter of my book? During this pause in the conversation, I thought about Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author. I was drawn to this idea of inverting a creative situation, like a colour going off in search of a painter. Since my characters had an author sitting at their dining table, it was up to them to continue feeding me with words.

My enthusiasm was to be dampened by the couple’s children. They showed absolutely no interest in me. We live in an age when everything seems normal. Is this because of television with its endless reality shows, enabling us to vicariously experience all sorts of improbable situations? Anything from police officers in a nudist camp to couples on the verge of divorce stranded on a desert island. If you can see or know everything there is to see and know, perhaps this inevitably leads to a lowering in the libido of curiosity; perhaps travel will one day lose its charm thanks to the existence of Google Maps. I thought about this as I observed the passive faces of the two teenagers. I tried to imagine how I would have felt if, at their age, my mother had invited a writer to have dinner with us; I think I would have wanted to know more about him, his motivations, and that I would even have tried to appear interesting (not an easy task given how little self-confidence I possessed at that age). I was surprised by their attitude, even knowing as I did that adolescence is an age when the outside world can sometimes seem as dull and pointless as a still life.

At fifteen, Jérémie looked as though he was carrying an immense weight on his shoulders. This impression was accentuated by the slowness of his movements. Even chewing food seemed like a herculean task. In other words, he was the living cliché of a sullen teenager. I started to wonder if fate had brought me into contact with the kind of hackneyed characters I could have invented for myself. A grandmother who was losing her memory, a slightly sad middle-aged woman, a man stressed out by his job, and now a miserable adolescent boy. Were these people the fruit of my weary imagination? No, they were real.

How could I pull my mind out of this downward spiral? I had to believe in the power of positive thinking. If you can persuade yourself that amazing things can happen, sometimes they actually will. I am fascinated by the kind of successful, happy people who say: ‘I always believed in myself. I knew I would make it …’ While self-confidence may not guarantee well-being, it is surely the most fertile soil for fulfilment. So I had to believe in my characters. I had to convince myself that beneath their apparent banality these people were hiding thrilling vices, were capable of unexpected acts that would render their existence captivating. Despite my initial premise – ‘all lives are fascinating’ – I was expecting something more from them. Then again, there must be a reader somewhere who would be enchanted by an analysis of the yawns of a Parisian teenager. A niche market, perhaps, but they do say there’s an audience for everything.