What if nothing had changed since then Lost illusions ? We remember that, in Balzac’s novel, the young Lucien Chardon, wishing to break into the high society of the Restoration, adopts his mother’s name and calls himself Lucien de Rubempré. At the start of the 21st century, Angie Motard is no less ashamed of her surname. Daughter of hippies born in 1978 and having grown up between Vanuatu and New Caledonia, she arrived in Paris with the dream of becoming an editor and perhaps writing herself. When she meets the publisher Léo Scheer, who becomes her pygmalion, she understands that something is wrong: “I knew that Angie Motard was not for her, and that I would have difficulty making a career with that name. Besides the fact that I had a bad relationship with my father, Motard is an ugly name, not vulgar but too local, franchouillard. Perhaps if I had been a doctor, Doctor Motard, I would have made fun of it. But in a literary career, therefore public, the name is important – a name is a brand. So I needed a name that sounded good, and Angie Motard does not sound good. Léo Scheer encouraged me to take the name of my mother. Angie David, it can be Jewish or Anglo-Saxon, there’s a mystery, it’s better than Motard!”
Angie David has worked for Léo Scheer since 2002. She receives us in her Paris office, located rue de l’Arcade (opposite the Hôtel Marigny, the famous brothel for men that Proust frequented). Her start to her career was paradoxical: on the other hand, she won the Goncourt biography prize in 2006 for her first book, devoted to Dominique Aury; On the other hand, she then struggles with an addiction to cocaine. She frequents a showbiz environment where the “sons of” are legion and she, “little wild Caldoche”, has neither the manners nor the network. It is one of the great hypocrisies of the Parisian cultural environment to profess openness while practicing inter-personality – from Charlotte Gainsbourg to Nicolas Bedos, and from Vincent Cassel to Raphaël Enthoven, there are many who do not did not need to make a name for themselves, having inherited it. Coming from a modest background, Angie David advances masked. Until she was officially renamed David in 2022 (thanks to the Dupond-Moretti law) she hid from everyone, even her friends, that her real name was Motard.
Having turned her back on worldliness, having emerged from her drug problems fifteen years ago and mother of two children, Angie David, on the other hand, has not changed her model. Dominique Aury, born Anne Desclos, and better known under the pseudonym Pauline Réage, remains the example for her to follow: “I devote a laudatory chapter to her in Fame. She is the greatest editor figure. There is no equivalent, it is unsurpassable. She was the first woman to sit on the Gallimard reading committee for twenty-five years – that’s still significant. Her freedom as a woman was in deeds, not in speeches. She never married and was bisexual, but appeared very conventional in appearance. She would never have campaigned for the MLF, she was even the opposite of that. And so she lived her entire life under false names. Having a diplomatic father and a very prudish, very austere mother, Anne Desclos became Dominique Aury to write in fairly hard-line far-right magazines, such as The Insurgent by Thierry Maulnier. She didn’t want her parents’ colleagues or neighbors bothering them because of her. Alongside Jean Paulhan at Gallimard, she then published people from all political sides, without ideological blinders. And when she wrote history of O, she signed Pauline Réage because of the sulphurous side of the novel. She wanted to be absolutely free and free from scandal – and the best way to do that is to change her name.”
If Fame is a sensitive autobiographical story (often funny too), the book takes the form of a literary essay in its second part. Angie David delicately evokes Claude Lévi (who took the name of his grandfather Isaac Strauss to forge Lévi-Strauss) or Marguerite Donnadieu (aka Marguerite Duras). She also talks about Constance Debré who in her book Name finished settling scores with her family: “She is a contemporary author that I like very much, and who counts. She embodies something, she is fascinating to observe. And, having written Name, she was right on my topic! There is something about her to mirror with my own story… She threw everything away: her work, her environment, her sexuality. It was hard for her son, and I don’t credit her approach on a moral level, but on an artistic level it’s interesting – she lost her feathers to be a writer, and I find that courageous and noble. But she’s lying when she says a last name is nothing. The proof: she hasn’t changed! She would have done it if the name Debré had not been useful to her. I think she genuinely loved her father. And I also believe, and she won’t admit it, that it helped her get started to be called Debré. A punk in a family of notables, an illustrious clan in France: she was a salesman. With another name, she would have interested the media less…”
“Nicolas Mathieu knew that he did not need a name that was too elegant and elitist”
As Angie David rightly writes in Fame, “to change your name is to enter straight into fiction”, and “doing politics in literature is a contradiction”. Preferring dandyism to dogmatism of any kind, she singles out Edouard Louis, ex-Eddy Bellegueule and author of Change: method : “An individual approach can influence other people who would take it up. But I don’t like the discourse side of him – as soon as there is discourse there is a form of authoritarianism. An artist has no not to pose as a lesson-giver and to consider that everyone who doesn’t do like him is an imbecile – I’m hardly exaggerating. And why does he constantly complain? He has risen socially! Unlike him, I’m not blaming society. Unless you’re incredibly unlucky, we all come across support here and there. Everyone is free to reinvent themselves.”
To finish this interview, we end with a game. Can Angie David give us the most beautiful names of living writers, and tell us those who, in her eyes, should have taken a pseudonym? On the lucky side, she answers Michel Houellebecq, Oscar Coop-Phane, Emmanuel Carrère, Eric Vuillard, Thibault de Montaigu and François-Henri Désérable. As for the less well off, here they are: “Nicolas Mathieu is very ordinary, but I think that it is a deliberate choice for him to have kept his name because he creates literature that is interested in little people. He there is an aesthetic coherence and a communication strategy. Mathieu is very intelligent, and he knew that he did not need a name that was too elegant and elitist – otherwise, he could not have been the spokesperson for the middle class crushed by globalization. Apart from Mathieu, the worst names for me are Laurent Binet, Kévin Lambert, Maria Pourchet and Cécile Coulon. Coulon, it’s atrocious – we think of the colon! When it started, I thought it wouldn’t work for her because of that, I saw it as too great a handicap. But in our demagogic era, that’s fine. If she had lived in the time of Stendhal, who had taken a pseudonym, he would have said to her: “Finally, it’s not is not possible Cécile, urgently find another name!”
Fame, by Angie David. Léo Scheer, 126 p., €18.
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