Interview Leïla Slimani
Feature Leila Slimani
A FAMILY AFFAIR
Slimani read a great deal of litera- ture about the dynamics between servants and the families they work for, notably Le Journal d’une Femme de Chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid), a 1900 novel by Octave Mirbeau about a servant who becomes entangled in the power struggles of her employ- ers’ marriage; and Jean Genet’s play “Les Bonnes” (“The Maids”), inspired by the case of real-life sisters Christine and Lea Papin, live-in maids who murdered their mistress and her daughter in Le Mains, France, in 1933. “I think it is an old story, a universal story” says Slimani, “but I wanted to put it in our contemporary world, in Paris, and see what it is today”.
Throughout history there has always been a very clear line between the mistress of the house and the domestic staff but now, Slimani observes, “everyone wants to do it as if they were friends; as if we were all equals”, a pretence which, in the novel, leads to tragedy.
S
limani was born in Morocco and moved to France at the age of 17 to enrol at Sciences Po, the renowned Paris Institute of Political Studies. Growing up in Rabat, she had a nanny and remembers that “even as a litle child, maybe six or seven, I could feel the competition between my mother and her”. She recalls the nanny being told that she was a part of the family “but at the same time I was aware that she was not really a member of the family. I was very aware of the hypocrisy, or at least that every one was playing a role—pretending she was a member of the family, but everyone knew she was not.”
But the seed for the novel came from the real-life case of Yoselyn
Ortega, a nanny from the Dominican Republic who was accused of murdering two young charges in her employer’s New York apartment in 2012. Slimani then saw the way into her novel, and where she would begin: “It was the first page I wrote,” she says of the heart-stopping opening, “and I never corrected it”. She knew she did not want to write “a classical thriller because a thriller is a
specific tpe of book with its own codes. I did not want the police investigation, or the morbid suspense around the murder of the children, to be the main narrative element.” Lullaby examines the place of the mother in today’s societ.
Myriam is a mother who loves her children but needs a life beyond them at work. She struggles with the idea that, as a mother, you are expected to subjugate your whole life to your children in the way that fathers of young children are not. Slimani is interested in what she calls the mythology around motherhood: “I remember when I was a teenager, people telling me: ‘You know, when you are a mother you will never feel lonely, you will feel so much love and you will be fulfilled by this love.’ Then I became a mother. And I learnt that is absolutely wrong, you can feel very lonely with your children, even if you love them... Motherhood is not only something very pure and very full of love, it can be full of dark things, too.” Lullaby is also a novel about class. Louise, Slimani observes, is an
invisible woman. “Firstly, she is a woman, then she has a precari- ous job and also she lives in the suburbs so [all these things make her] invisible in our societ.” In the novel we see the face that Louise presents to the family, and to Wafa, another childminder, a new friend that she makes in the local park. But beneath Louise’s unruf- fled exterior there are dark currents; an abusive marriage to her late husband, an estrangement from her daughter and her mistreat- ment at the hands of former employers, all of which help to propel her towards the tragedy.
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MOTHERHOOD IS NOT ONLY SOMETHING VERY PURE AND VERY FULL OF LOVE, IT CAN BE FULL OF DARK THINGS, TOO
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Debut novels not to miss
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