Fanny could say that she has made a success of her life. A librarian in a so-called “difficult” middle school, she finds no greater joy than passing on a love of reading—a refuge—to those so often deprived of beauty and stability. But Fanny carries within her the heavy secret of a nuclear childhood marked by abandonment and trauma. By keeping those painful memories locked away in the cellar of her mind, Fanny manages to hold on. Upright and steadfast. She endures. Yet her husband, Guillaume, and their two children long for greater peace with her, and wish for her to undertake the inner work that might lead her to reconcile with her past. But Fanny claims a right to anger—an anger that has kept her going until now… at least until that phone call informing her of the death of the woman who was never truly her mother.
Mordre l’orage (Biting The Storm) explores what we are given and what, in turn, we pass on.