“The Doll’s House”, by Florence Hirigoyen, Les Arènes, 216 p., €27.
Florence Hirigoyen was 4 years old the first time her father raped her. From this act repeated several times thereafter, she could have drawn a written testimony in the first person or an autofiction. It is for a rather unusual genre that she opted: the photo-novel, narrative mode in vogue when she was a child, especially in sentimental magazines.
Speech therapist in the Vosges, having never published before, the author, aged 52, accentuated the impression of “time jump” by having his sketches performed, not by actors, but by dolls that seem to have come out of an attic. His book, dollhouse, jostles the reader with its formal singularity. The modesty of the means used refers him to the tangibility of a crime with irreparable damage, incest.
A deep traumatic amnesia has long inhibited Florence Hirigoyen. As a teenager, she knew intimately that she had been raped, but could not activate her memory: “It was as if I had no more memories, she tells the “World of Books”. I was convinced, suddenly, to be crazy. » The transition to adulthood does not help matters: “I thought what happened to me was my fault,” she continues, before evoking the figure of this engineer father in the steel industry, who died in 2015, “absolute leader” at home and “typical patriarchal model”.
“You are the victim”
On the facts, committed in a bathroom, the victim retains only the essentials today: “He was very stressed by nature and must have been in a situation of terrible tension, probably because of his work. He took it out on me. I was at his feet, I served as a valve. »
Timorous in the extreme, entangled in a failed marriage, Florence Hirigoyen would never have raised her head without a click, which occurred four years ago in a bistro. A verbal altercation with a client – a teacher of her daughter, with whom she is in conflict – ends in death threats from the latter. Sorry for the inconvenience caused by the scene, she apologizes to the bartender. “You don’t have to, you are the victim,” this one answers him. “It’s the first time I’ve heard that,” she confides. Back home, a decision soon grips her whole being: “I allowed myself to defend myself, to stop thinking that I am responsible for everything. » Redemption will go through a literary project.
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