Interview with Emmanuel Carrere [Read This Next]

The interview with Emmanuel Carrere about Lives Other Than My Own — this week’s Read This Next title — just went live. Here’s an excerpt:

Lily Ye: You write that this is a book for others (especially Juliette’s daughters), but has it had an effect on you as well? How do you think this narrative will affect readers who do not personally know the people you are writing about?

Emmanuel Carrere: I would not write books if I did not expect or at least hope that they would have an effect on myself (not only making myself a better writer, but a better person). I’d like for my books to be read not only by devoted and informed readers, but also, let’s say, by the kind of people who read only one or two books in a year. I try to deal with complex issues in the simplest and clearest way, and, as you know, being simple and clear is a very demanding job. And I feel gratified when people who have had to cope with illness, great poverty or mourning and, for these reasons, were afraid to open a book about such issues, tell me that reading it has helped them.

LY: How was writing this book different from writing My Life as a Russian Novel?

EC: That book was autobiographical, which this one is not—although I am present as narrator and witness. My Life as a Russian Novel was about misfortune brought on by neurosis (I don’t know how else to translate the French word “Malheur”), this book is about ordinary misfortune (by which I mean illness, separation, death)—and I agree with Freud when he says that the best thing you can expect of psychoanalysis is to exchange neurotic misfortune for ordinary misfortune. Finally, I published My Life as a Russian Novel against the will of two of its main characters (my mother and my girlfriend Sophie). I took the risk of deeply hurting their feelings (which I had to, for my own sake, but which I regret and hope never to do again). Lives Other Than My Own was written at the request and with the agreement of its main characters: I submitted the book to them before it was published and gave them the opportunity to ask for any changes they wanted (in fact, they asked almost nothing)—and for all these reasons I feel at peace with them and with myself.

Click here to read the entire interview. On Friday we’ll be posting a review of this novel, and hopefully in the next month or so, we’ll have a review of Carrere’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead: A Journey Into the Mind of Philip K. Dick, which I’ve been wanting to read for years. . . .