Juliette Rousseau

La vie têtue

Stubborn Life

September 7, 2022

Novel

120 pages

130 × 210 mm

15 €

978-2-3662-4694-0

From the family home where she has returned to live, a woman, speaking to her missing sister, summons memories of their childhood. Carrying a heavy past of patriarchal violence, she explores the possibilities of surviving this heritage, in a devastated rural landscape, where the hedges have disappeared and the forest is less thinning, surrounded by industrial corn fields. In this story composed of short chapters, Juliette Rousseau offers us a poignant, sensitive and luminous first literary text that pays tribute to the women of her family.

The author

Juliette Rousseau was born in 1986 in a small village in Haute-Bretagne. Alternately author, journalist, translator, editor and activist, she explores different forms of writing and their emancipatory potential. Recently, she chose to return to live in the hamlet of her childhood. La vie têtue is the product of this return to her roots, and her first novel.

Strong points

After the essay Lutter ensemble, Juliette Rousseau offers a first poignant literary text, in which she reconnects with the women in her family based on her own experience of motherhood.

A sensitive reflection on how one appropriates a family heritage, sometimes violent, while at the same time extracting oneself from it before doing oneself the work of transmission.

An address to her missing sister that is accompanied by a sensitive observation of the transformation of the rural landscape that surrounds her and of certain irreversible upheavals in nature.