Delphine de Vigan - Nothing Holds Back the Night

Absolutely stunningJanice Galloway

Delphine deVigan is a sensation

Observer

DELPHINE DE VIGAN

BLOOMSBURY CIRCUS

Winner of the 2011 Prix FNACand the Grand Prix des lectrices de ELLE

Based on her childhood, Nothing Holds Back the Nightis the moving and surprising new novel fromDelphine de Vigan, author of the bestselling Richardand Judy-selected No and Me and the GoncourtPrize-shortlisted Underground Time.

Lucile,the narrators mother, a former childmodel from a large Bohemian family, raises hertwo daughters largely alone. She is younger andmore glamorous than the other mothers: alwaysin lipstick and stylishly dressed, wayward andwonderful. But as the years pass her occasionalsadness gives way to overwhelming despair anddelusion. She becomes convinced she is telepathic,in control of the Paris metro system, with a specialinternet connection to the heart of Apple Inc., shenumbers Marcello Mastroianni among her lovers,and argues with Jacques Lacan; she is hospitalised,medicated and then released in a kind of trance.Young Delphine grows up wondering: Whatchanged her? Or did something shape her all along?

This is a story of luminous beauty andrambunctious joy, of dark family secrets andsilences, revelations and, ultimately, the unknowabilityof even those closest to us. And in the face of theunknowable, personal history becomes fiction: a lifereconstructed using imagination, acute self-awarenesshumour and marvellous sympathy. Nothing Holds Backthe Night is universally recognisable and singularlyheartbreaking.

No and MeUnderground Time

For Margot

One day as I was painting, black invaded the whole canvas, withoutshape or contrast or transparency.

In that extreme I saw a kind of negation of black.

The differences in texture reflected more or less faintly the light,and a light emanated from the darkness, a pictorial light theemotional power of which stimulated my desire to paint.

My instrument was no longer the dark, but that secret light thatcame from the dark.

Pierre Soulages

My mother was blue, a pale blue mixed with the colour of ashes. Strangely, when I found her at home that January morning, her hands were darker than her face. Her knuckleslooked as though they had been splashed with ink.

My mother had been dead for several days.

I dont know how many seconds or possibly minutes I neededto take this in, despite how obvious it was (my mother was lyingon her bed, unresponsive to all entreaties); it was a very longtime, a clumsy, frantic time, until a cry came from my lungs, asthough I had been holding my breath for several minutes. Today,more than two years later, that still puzzles me: how did my brainmanage to keep the perception of my mothers body at such adistance, especially its smell? How could it take so long to acceptthe information that lay before it? Thats not the only questionher death left me with.

Four or five weeks later, in an unusually impenetrable state ofnumbness, I received the Booksellers Prize for a novel whichfeatured a mother walled up in herself and withdrawn fromeverything, who regains her ability to speak after years of silence.

I gave my own mother a copy of the book before it came out,probably feeling proud of having completed a new novel, but alsoconscious, even through fiction, of turning the knife in thewound.

I have no memory of where the prize-giving took place nor ofthe ceremony itself. 1 dont think the terror had left me; and yet Ismiled. A few years earlier, when the father of my childrenreproached me for rushing headlong into the future (he mentioned myannoying ability to put on a brave face, whatever the circumstances), I had self-importantly told him that I was in life.

I kept smiling at the dinner in my honour; my only concernwas to remain upright, then seated, not to suddenly collapseinto my plate, or plunge head-first as I had done at the age oftwelve into an empty swimming pool. I remember the physical,indeed athletic dimension this effort to hold on required, evenif no one was taken in. It seemed to me better to contain thesadness, to bottle it up, muffle it, silence it until I was finallyalone, rather than give in to what could only have been a longhowl or, even worse, a deep moan, and would undoubtedlyhave prostrated me on the floor. Over the past few months,events in my life had sped up markedly and life had once againset the bar too high. And so, it seemed to me, there was nothingelse to do except put a brave face on it or else face up to it (evenif it meant pretending).

And as far as that is concerned, I have known for a long timethat its better to remain upright than lie down, and better to avoidlooking down.

In the months that followed I wrote another book I had been planning for several months. In hindsight I dont know how I managedit, except that there was nothing else to do once the children hadgone to school and I was in the void, nothing apart from that chairwaiting in front of the computer, nowhere else for me to sit, Imean, nowhere to put myself. After eleven years with the samecompany and a long confrontation which had left me feelingdrained I had just been sacked; I was conscious of feeling a kindof dizziness when I found Lucile at home, so blue and still, andthen the dizziness turned into terror and the terror to a kind of fog.I wrote every day and no one but me knows how much that book,which has nothing to do with my mother, nonetheless bears theimprint of her death and the state of mind it left me in. And thenthat book came out and there was no mother to leave hilariousmessages on my answering machine about my TV appearances.

One evening that same winter on our way back from an appointment at the dentists, as we walked side by side on the narrowpavement on the rue de la Folie-Mericourt, my son asked me,without warning or anything in our preceding conversation whichcould have led him to it: Did Grandma... commit suicide, in asense?

Even today when I think of this question, I feel overwhelmed; notfor its meaning but its form, that in a sense from the lips of a

nine-year-old child, a precaution for my sake, a way of testing thewater, of tiptoeing. But maybe he was genuinely asking a question:given the circumstances, should Luciles death be consideredsuicide?

The day 1 found my mother at home I was unable to pick upmy children. They stayed at their fathers. The following day Itold them about their grandmothers death; I think I said something like, Grandmas dead, and in reply to their questions:She decided to go to sleep (and yet I have read Fran^oiseDolto). A few weeks later, my son was calling me back to order:a spade is a spade. Grandma committed suicide, yes, she didherself in, rang down the curtain, gave up, called it a day, saidstop, enough, basta, and she had good reasons for coming tothat conclusion.

I dont know when the idea came to me to write about my mother,around her, starting from her. I know how strongly I resisted the idea,kept it at a distance for as long as possible, making a list of thecountless authors who have written about their mothers, from theearliest to the most recent, as a way of proving how thoroughly theseam had been mined and the subject overworked. I banishedphrases which came to me in the early hours or prompted by amemory, and so many openings of novels in all possible formswhose first words I didnt want to hear. I listed obstacles whichwould inevitably arise and the incalculable risks I would run inundertaking such a task.

My mother represented too vast a field, too dark, too desperate;in short, too risky.