We can always count on her to electrify a much too wise literary rentrée, only animated by the controversy surrounding the (heavy) thesis novel by Aurélien Bellanger. After The House And MisconductEmma Becker publishes the Badly pretty (Albin Michel), which has been the subject of conversation in the publishing world for several months. Emma Becker recounts in detail her passionate and adulterous story with Antonin de Quincy d’Avricourt, an aristocratic writer who loves sulphurous authors (Rebatet, Brasillach…), opera and red velvet trousers. Beyond the identity of this Antonin – easily recognizable – and a few intimate scenes that have caused a stir, The Pretty Evil is above all a magnificent love story written in a swinging language. “While this book will bristle as much neo-feminists as false devotees, it will delight true literature lovers, who will salute in Becker the only heir to Colette worthy of the name” we announced at the beginning of August.
But the thirty-year-old also proves to be a fascinating interviewee. Far from the wooden language that is all too common in her profession, Emma Becker speaks very freely about female desire as well as the contradictions of feminism, class contempt in the literary world or her family questions. Interview.
L’Express: This fall, several authors from the younger generation (Aurélien Bellanger, Abel Quentin) are tackling major social issues. You, you remain faithful to your favorite theme: the intimate…
Emma Becker: I haven’t read Bellanger yet. I admit that current affairs interest me less in the long term than the great universal themes that are relationships between people. I don’t write about politics but about the intimate, and that’s timeless. My hope is that people, fed up with current affairs, will prefer to immerse themselves in a love story like the one I tell.
Did the fact that your lover, named Antonin in the book, is a right-wing man pose a problem?
The right is not an unknown territory to me: I come from a right-wing family, I was raised by right-wing men. I had to invent myself under the yoke of people like that, it is a familiar environment. So I know right-wing men by heart. None of them have ever explained to me how to be a good feminist. They are not into mansplaining! They don’t care, but at least they have the advantage of not pretending otherwise. Whereas left-wing men, who pride themselves on being deconstructed, believe they are teaching you what a woman is. I feel much better in the company of men who know that feminism is not their domain and do not get involved in it. The condescension and paternalism of right-wing men is nothing to me, I find it easy to defend myself against it.
Did Antonin “deconstruct” himself through your contact?
He is rather a deconstructed man at the base! He does not have this temptation to want to be something other than what he is. He knows why he likes women, he is surrounded by women more than by men, he shows women gallantry, good manners… I have rarely been listened to as he listens to me. He does not constantly bring it up, a common failing among men of the left. Some friends were still worried: what was I going to do with a man of the right? As if I had been until then a spearhead of the radical left!
“I like men who don’t have to apologize all the time.”
In the book, a man says that “right-wing guys are better in bed.” True?
Right-wing men are free from all the anxieties that have recently grown among the younger generations of left-wing men: being in abuse. When you make love with right-wing guys, you don’t have to justify yourself as a woman for wanting to be treated the way you want. I like men who are sure of themselves, who know what makes them want you and who don’t have to apologize all the time. It’s not a question of going beyond consent, but in sexuality, two adversities rub against each other, that’s the principle, and I like that.
Now, I don’t want to make a caricature of left-wing and right-wing male sexuality. It’s not an interesting divide. But the only thing I’m pointing out is that right-wing men don’t apologize for being men—and there’s nothing more disheartening than having to apologize in intimate relationships.
From page 25, your heroine arrives at Antonin’s, “an alcove of a marquis dressing his servants”. Is this retro imagery a fantasy? A literary game?
I like this formulation, I find it piquant – it’s my little John Malkovich side in the Dangerous Liaisons. Fantasy and reality are two different things: I found the image exciting. I don’t feel like I’m changing politically because I suddenly find myself with a right-wing man. It would be slightly reactionary to think that I absorb the opinions of the man I love: you’ll notice that men are never suspected of being influenced by the women they’re with…
Your book valorizes a 50-year-old white male, and yet it shocks many men of this generation. Why?
Because of the passages about Antonin’s asshole… Anal sex among straight guys remains a huge taboo. We can’t talk about men’s asses. In my book, I put Antonin on all fours, it’s less easy to digest than when I am, and a man takes me on. Here is the proof that Antonin is deconstructed: it doesn’t bother him to find himself in one of my books in that position, he doesn’t care what people think of him.
This is why he is an aristocrat and not a bourgeois!
I didn’t know about this social difference before I met Antonin. But Antonin actually has nothing to lose. I’m not doing him any harm. In MisconductI was talking about a big bourgeois. These people are much more afraid of what people will say. Many men are afraid of what I write.
You seem obsessed with social contempt…
I was told many times that I was not from the same world as Antonin, that we did not have the same codes, that he would not want to tarnish his image with me… Little by little, it obsessed me. I was madly in love and I could not make Antonin enter my world – for him, it would have been a tumble. Could I enter his? In Saint-Germain-des-Prés, you meet a lot of well-born people who wrinkle their noses: some say that I want to get married, that I dream of a little ring and a double particle…
Let’s talk about eroticism again. In this literary field, are gay writers better?
What I’ve always liked about Hervé Guibert or Guillaume Dustan is that when they talk about sex, they talk about it without embellishment. Straight people never mention the preparation of the ground, so as not to tarnish the sacred image of women, which is a dangerous illusion. In my book, there is an enema scene. In Albin Michel’s book, the copy editor wanted me to cut it. It shocked her. Guys are obsessed with girls’ asses, but the question never occurs to them: why don’t they ever want to do it from behind? Quite simply for the reason I mentioned… We have to clear up any misunderstandings!
“Kids always end up hating us, and for very good reasons.”
How to renew yourself when you write about your own life? Philippe Jaenada has managed to renew himself by writing about news stories for about ten years. How will you do it?
Without being essentialist, a large part of women’s lives takes place in silence and interiority. So there is always something to say about it. I was not the same two years ago, I will be different again in two years. The world is not really made to our measure… And feminism itself is constantly changing. When I released The House In 2019, we listened to Marguerite Stern a lot as the poster girl, the radical feminist… Now, in this environment, no one wants to hear about her anymore, because she got involved in the issue of transidentity.
I will just add one point: the female experience is not limited to women. Since books have existed, we have been learning from the male experience. Why should men not learn from our experience? It seems to me that this is a dialogue, above the debates between right and left.
At the end of your book, you say that it could be considered “abominable.” Where do you place the moral boundary in what you can and cannot say, particularly in relation to your two children?
Deep down, it’s me who finds it and finds myself abominable… Nobody tells me that I’m an unworthy mother. If you want to moralize, you don’t write literature. Every time I’m finishing a book, I procrastinate. How could my husband excuse such a book? To live with a writer you have to have “balls” like my husband, or be a writer.
What I do is monstrous. But in this display of narcissism and selfishness, I tell myself that I will reassure some readers… I live haunted by the guilt of the twists and turns that I make my family experience, only I did not want my children to remember that I had sacrificed my life for them. In any case, children have no gratitude for their parents. In this case, it is better not to be a martyr of the couple.
When you write literature “live” like you, are you doomed to regret?
Any regrets I might have are not literary. I also like The Pretty Evil for her flaws, her messy side, a little too hot-headed… Children always end up hating us, and for excellent reasons. With me, they won’t have to look far. But they will understand that being a parent is not the whole of life, that there is something else. A mother like me, who complains and is full of storms, is perhaps healthier than a nice mother who smiles and who in the end will lose her temper. Maybe I find excuses for myself. You have to live with guilt…
The pretty Evil, by Emma Becker. Albin Michel, 416 p., €21.90.
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