Memoir Here, "Mémoires" There

Dear Worlds, 

I am not knowledgeable about French literature, even though I was good in school and went to school for a long time when I was in France. I started finishing reading books on a regular basis about four years ago. I was thirty. Up until then, I either finished books reluctantly in school just to be able to take the test and forget about it, or read a good 36 pages of any book thinking, "this is so interesting", and put the book down for good.

There were two things that kept me from reading from a very young age: one, I had a sense that if I spent my time reading, I would miss something that I had to be witness to in order to take care of the people around me, and two, the literature curriculum was just not appealing to me. There was nothing engaging about the way girls and women were portrayed in the vast majority of novels written by oh so many renowned French male writers. And from a young age, I chose to believe that it was the only kind of books there were. I filled my life with other things. 

Fast-forward, three years before I moved to Canada, I started reading memoirs in particular - and finishing them! -, and shortly after I moved to Canada, I started writing my own.

To my knowledge, memoirs are not a big genre in France, if a genre at all. It makes sense, culturally. There is a sense of shame, more than in North America, around the idea of daring to write about oneself if one is not famous. Same goes with live storytelling, as I was telling you before: not a thing for French people. Telling my story was not encouraged, neither in my family nor in my culture as a whole.

The translation of the word memoir in French actually means something slightly different. "Les mémoires" (always masculine and plural) is a genre that is halfway between history and autobiography: such story of someone who took part in certain political, social or other public events sheds a light on their broader time and place, and is of interest for historians. In such books, the focus is not someone's emotional truth.

There are many reasons why I came to live on this side of the Atlantic ocean, but I am becoming more and more certain that the way personal stories are written, told, sung, narrated in any form here, is very high on that list.