Book explores family trauma and personal history
In Possédés, Laetitia Faure returns to her personal history, from childhood to adulthood, highlighting the influence of the denial of family violence. The book opens with a striking quote from "Désordre des familles" by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault: "The family is the privileged place where private tranquility creates a certain form of public order."Hybrid narrative structure
Presented by the publisher as a novel, the work is described as a hybrid narrative, halfway between autobiography and autofiction. The author recounts the different stages of her life in a bourgeois Catholic family, marked by the desire to remain united despite violence, abuse, abandonment, and denial.Narrative organized by life stages
The narrative is organized around the places where the narrator lived: childhood with both parents, life after their divorce, the journey in Italy, Paris, and Seattle, the first moment of emancipation, the return to the south of France, where the narrator reconnects with her family and gives birth to her daughter, and finally the major moment of the sale of her grandmother's house, which takes the form of a farewell to her family.Personal reflection on name and time
A final page indicates a time - 17:21 - and explains the etymology of her name: joy, happiness. She states: "I begin to touch it with my fingers," although the narrative does not seem to support the idea that she has found an exit.Family background and dynamics
Born in a practicing Catholic family, which multiplies pilgrimages and expressions of faith, with a violent father (the episodes where this is manifested remain limited, and the same events are always revisited), who multiplies adventures, spouses, and children in each marriage, and a mother who retreats into religion when her husband abandons her, the narrator and her siblings solidify to face the disorder.Brother and sister's entrapment
However, according to her view, with the arrival of adolescence and adulthood, her brother and sister remain trapped in the family dynamics: Michel, the brother, becomes a priest and keeps the faith even though he was abused by the religious figure in whom the family had complete trust; Natalia, the sister, adopts denial and relativizes the events.Religious and alternative practices
The title refers to one of the originalities of the narrative: the coexistence of the religious and superstitious, psychiatric, medical, and borderline scientific practices that recall the beliefs of the 19th century. In an attempt to escape the symptoms and suffering, the narrator turns not only to Catholic religion but also to what seems like sects, to popular practices linked to beliefs, to psychoanalysis, psychology, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), and physical treatment methods such as kinesiology, physiotherapy, relaxation techniques (ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response), massage therapy, as well as a magnetizer.Psychic and physical possession
The possession is here religious but also psychic: the children grow up under the threat of physical and sexual violence, which manifests at times, and under the threat of losing the affection of their parents, of seeing the bonds broken, the same bonds that the narrator, once an adult, wishes to break at all costs.Emancipation and therapeutic efforts
Possédés thus raises the question of the difficulty of emancipating oneself from dysfunctional family circles and highlights the fact that the desire to find a form of love characterized by reassuring presence, care, and recognition of feelings and experiences remains practically impossible to eradicate. How to overcome this? What means allow this? If geographical distance and therapeutic and pseudo-therapeutic efforts contribute only partially, the conclusion to which the narrator seems to arrive is that writing can allow one to overcome the traumas of such a family.Impact on children and family legacy
However, the reader's impression often diverges. Every person born into a violent and abusive family feels the need to prevent this shadow from falling on their children, like a wicked fairy who leans over their cradle at birth, to protect them from the reproduction of patterns that have marked the family history over several generations. However, the birth of the narrator's daughter does not determine a rupture here.Breakthrough moment and family trauma
For the narrator, the only one in the family to have children, manages only very late to renounce all contact with her family and thus exposes her daughter, Emy, to what is described as "an incestuous climate." However, the realization of this exposure (when, during a family gathering, the same cousin who had sexually assaulted the narrator at the beginning of her adolescence wants to play with her daughter by "tickling" her) constitutes one of the triggers that push her to break and understand the logic of her feelings.Comparison with other works
Indeed, without the analytical clarity of "Triste tigre" by Neige Sinno, the narrative of Possédés leads the narrator and the reader toward a key question: in violent and abusive families, it is the mother (or the parent who is neither violent nor abusive) who determines the possibility of exiting the psychic and physical circle of pain. Without the recognition of the trauma by the parent who did not cause it, there is no real possible repair, only a sharp break, and it must be realized as soon as possible, despite the solitude and isolation it causes.Narrative style and reader engagement
Sometimes the writer lingers or retracts too much, certain episodes struggle to capture the reader's attention, as if hindered by a lack of relativization that occasionally makes the experience appear overly dramatic, on an impressionistic tone, emphasizing the confusion of feelings. However, Possédés raises a major and urgent current question that seems to focus on an indeterminate literary genre that is quite stimulating: autobiography, autofiction, novel?Author's approach and literary form
Laetitia Faure tells her story as she can, as it imposes itself. Her novel that is not quite a novel astonishes and leaves behind a writing that may or may not come.
