“The fat one,” she recounts the harassment she suffered at school because of her weight

“The big one”, “the cow”… Here are the terrible nicknames Olivia Ruiz was given from ages 9 to 11s. At the time, she was living with her parents who were “bleeding[aient] to offer him a decent life” by working in a small café which served as a tobacconist, press office and hotel. The family lived in a small village between Narbonne and Carcassonne. Around this time, Olivia experienced a significant bodily change. “ I have had a big weight gain all at once. Well, too much to have peace at school! » she recalled to Frédéric Lopez.

The 44-year-old singer told an anecdote which illustrates this dark period of her life when insults rained down. The little girl she was hid from her parents the harassment she suffered at school “to protect them from this violence”. But his mother, someone “very eccentrice “, one day triggered the confession without meaning to. “She comes and tells me I bought you a pair of jogging pants at the market”said the interpreter of There Ftake chocolate. It was a pair of jogging pants with “a cow’s head drawn on it.” Olivia Ruiz decided to reveal her secret at that moment, saying that “it wasn’t going to be possible to wear the jogging pants” because she was afraid of being subjected to another round of teasing at school.

Olivia Ruiz: “I paid a lot, it increased the mockery tenfold”

But his mother, as a free and determined woman, did not hear it that way at all. ” You do not care ! If you like it, you put it on and you don’t care about the looks, you’re a warrior! », she would have asked. Olivia followed her mom’s advice, but maybe she shouldn’t have. “I wear it, because yes, I am a warrior, but behind it I take a lot of money, it increases the mockery tenfold”, she remembered. “ These are hard years, but at the same time, years that are forging”she agrees today, with hindsight.

Now his mother’s determination runs through his veins. If she keeps “a relationship with the body that is always complicated, which is still being constructed”, the artist has a determination to accept himself “and still a certain pride in having passed this period by remaining standing and having protected [s]your parents ». This period also helped her find her vocation, since it was at this time that she discovered that music could be “a hell of a therapy”.

Camille Bonvalet has an interest in societal subjects and feminist issues. She is also passionate about literature. Versatile, she appreciates the prose of Flaubert as much as that of Michel…