Chloé Delaume

Pauvre folle

Crazy Woman

August 18, 2023
Novel
240 pages
19,50 €
9782021497724
978-2-0214-9772-4

“Fiction et Cie” collection

																Chloé Delaume, Pauvre folle
																Chloé Delaume, Pauvre folle

In all love stories, the wounds of childhood are replayed: one either heals or deepens their wounds.To understand the nature of her relationship with Guillaume, Clotilde Mélisse reflects on the memories that resurface in her mind during a train journey to Heidelberg. As landscapes of the end of the world pass by the window, Clotilde revisits the defining events of her life. The discovery of poetry in her mother’s library, there mother’s murder at the hands of her father, adolescence and its suicidal impulses, the diagnosis of her bipolar disorder. Her encounter, ten years ago, with Guillaume, their epistolary connection that resembled addiction, and the implosion of their idyll upon contact with reality.
Because Guillaume has returned, and for seventeen months, Clotilde has been losing her mind. She, who blossomed within her singleness, sees her heart and soul ravaged by the resurgence of this impossible love. The passing decade changes nothing: Guillaume is still gay and, moreover, in a relationship. Nevertheless, as the train makes its stops, Clotilde hopes to find a solution before reaching the terminus.

Second selection – Prix des Inrocks
The author

Chloé Delaume was born in 1973. She has been writing in many forms and media since the late 1990s. She has written nearly thirty books as if they were experiments: novels, poetic fragments, plays, essays, self-fiction. She is fond of hybrid objects and the mixing of genres: a novel illustrated by a video game (Corpus Simsi), the hijacking of a board game (Certainement pas), fan fiction in which you are the hero (La nuit je suis Buffy Summers). But also diary of a home performance (J’habite dans la télévision), dystopia (Les sorcières de la République). If her first novel, Les mouflettes d’Atropos, was tinged with radical feminism, she later focused on the issue of sisterhood by publishing Mes bien chères sœurs and the collective work Sororité.
Winner of the Prix Décembre 2001 for Le cri du sablier, she was a resident at the Villa Médicis in 2010-2011 and won the Prix Médicis 2020 with Le cœur synthétique.

August 18, 2023
Novel
240 pages
19,50 €
9782021497724
978-2-0214-9772-4

“Fiction et Cie” collection