These Women Are Burning, and Their Writing Burns Us
There’s nothing more fascinating than attending a conversation between people who admire each other. Admiration and affection create a familiar climate, an aura of tranquillity that lightens the room.
Lella Costa and Lydie Salvayre manage to do just that: they share an intimacy that clasps the audience in a warm embrace. Costa has always had the incredible ability to create connections with the people she’s interviewing – today, her magic happens once again.
The starting point is 7 Femmes (2013), recently translated in Italian. In this book, Salvayre tells the stories of seven writers – her “fragile icons” – in a journey of complete identification.
Emily Brontë, Colette, Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, Marina Cvetaeva, Ingeborg Bachmann and Sylvia Plath: these seven women come to life in Salvayre’s book. Together with Costa, they manage to invoke them on the stage.
Different women and yet somehow similar stories. A similar experience of sorrow, a tragic life, a destiny that seemed to condemn them to eternal suffering. But also the same, obsessive love for writing. “If I don’t write, I go mad” says Virginia Woolf. Writing becomes a form of escapism from an unsatisfying life: it’s better to die creating than to live in boredom, caged into a “living dollhouse”. It’s no secret that many of them actually brought that ending on themselves by committing suicide.
They were also avant-garde figures, ready to speak their minds against the establishment, and for that same vocality they paid their price. Many of them were “killed gently, day by day” by the monotony of the role they were forced to interpret. And yet, they never tried to attract anyone’s pity.
Salvayre’s book is particularly important, states Costa, because it highlights the importance of biographies to really understand a writer’s work. Looking at their lives, at their sorrows and joys, enables the readers to fully understand who they were, and might give them an insight on why they wrote the way they did. It’s a matter of empathy, of creating connections, of understanding how life and writing are deeply intertwined.
“They’re not merely writing sentences, living and writing are the same thing to them”.
A red thread linking them all is a constant feeling of “not being enough” – something all too often inculcated in a woman's mind. This feeling, though, can become an engine, an inciting incident for future creation. Many kept writing in spite of the difficulties, and didn't let anything stop them.
“These women are burning, and their writing burns us” – the use of the present tense is intentional, another way to make them eternal. These burns can be caused by a caustic form of irony, something Costa is incredibly interested in. Their wit allowed them to play many parts, create fascinating alter-egos we still remember and love.
After so much pain and sorrow, Costa has one last question: is it possible to create real art and be at least a little happy? Salvayre smiles – the answer seems to be a direct “no”. After all, her own writing often stems directly from sorrow: collecting others’ pain, in particular that of young people, is her inciting incident.
As the conversation comes to a close, Costa reads a page from Salvayre’s most famous novel, Pas pleurer, a partially autobiographical novel telling her mother’s story, and her tears of commotion are the perfect ending to an emotional encounter.