Valerie Valère

Valerie Valère is a French écrivaine born Valerie Samama on November 1st 1961 with Paris and died the December 18th 1982 with Saint-Maur-on-the-Dormouse (the Eure and Loir) in the house which it had rented 3 rue de la Mairie.

Biography

Shooting star of the French literature, Valerie Valère marked the end of the year 1970 by its evil of living and its tragic destiny. Anorexic, hypersensitive, incompetent to be happy in spite of success, it took refuge in the writing without to find peace and happiness there. Death was for it a delivery. There remains to us his work, abundant and atypical but ignored, which deserves to pass the test of time.

Born on November 1st, 1961, Valerie Valère (of her true name Valerie Samama) is born in Paris in the 15th district. She is the second child of a middle-class couple of origin Tunisia. His/her Eric brother is three years old more than it. The father is engineer and the mother secretary. Seemingly, an small family all that there is of more traditional and conventional.

Seemingly only… Indeed, the couple actually is very divided and frequently disputes. Very often absent, the father would have many mistresses and the mother would not be remains about it, seems it, side adventures extraconjugales. The birth of Valerie thus does not transport her parents of joy because it is what is called a nondesired child. All its life, Valerie will feel this lack of love, so much of its father which is never there than of his/her mother who hardly testifies to him to affection. All its literary work is impregnated and the topic of the absence is recurring in all its books.

In spite of this lack of love (his/her mother does not hesitate to say to him that it is ugly), the childhood of Valerie is held quietly. Good pupil at the school, Valerie is wise classifies some but distant with the others. As of this time, it often takes refuge in the dream and the imaginary one. The life already starts to weigh to him.

But truths problems appear only a few years later, with adolescence. Whereas others fuguent or drink, Valerie becomes anorexic. We are at the summer 1975. She is 13 years old.

Part on vacation in a friend, it develops a deep aversion for food and refuses to feed. Already frail, it still loses weight and falls ill. Of return to Paris, his/her mother can only note her lamentable physical status: Valerie weighs nothing any more but 31 kg.

Thrown into a panic and on the opinion of a doctor, his mother then makes it intern in a large Parisian psychiatric hospital where it will remain more than four months, time that it agrees to be renourrir and to take again weight.

Little time after its exit of the hospital, a little before Christmas, Valerie is registered at the school of the circus of Annie Fratellini and follows in particular courses of dance and balance on cord. In this institution, it becomes acquainted with Marion Hänsel (the future director of Dust and cruel Weddings ) and takes part in the first short film of this one, Équilibres .

In the magazine Always Runs (n° January 3rd, th and th 1999), Philippe Deprez makes a short analysis of the short film of fiction of Marion Hänsel. “ Équilibres was turned to Paris with like Valerie main character a teenager funambulist in the search of his balance, of a wire to return in the world. Quasi dumb film, it makes it possible the director to center our attention on perception, sometimes thin, sometimes tended, of the young girl in hillock to the incomprehension of his/her mother and of people in general. Only on its wire she dances with the sound of a music of viol of the Rebirth with for only spectator accessory and confidant a grackle that her mantle milked to bird of death. Incipient femininity, dumb questions and metaphysics interrogations live this film without dialogs that only the song and the beats of wings of the bird punctuate. Valerie as much of other heroins of Marion Hänsel is a woman sublimated in her search of personality, of existence. To see it dancing in this dead and indifferent world one cannot prevent oneself from thinking of the characters of Paul Delvaux. Only being of flesh, alive in a cold, fixed, insensitive world. The first page of a work which considers the women and the mysteries of their heart. ” ( Balances , 1977,12 ', 35 mm, coul. Réal. and scén. : Marion Hänsel. Int. : Valerie Valère, Marie-France Manual. Images: François Charlet. Its: Henri Morelle.)

Forsaking the dance and the circus for the comedy, it on television starts a career of actress ( Pierrette of Guy Jorré according to Honore de Balzac) and with the theater ( Lulu of Maurice Maeterlinck with Jeanne Moreau).

But it does not feel in its place on a film set or a scene of theater. It thus gives up the comedy to be devoted only and exclusively to the writing.

The writing entered its life at the summer 1977. His/her mother having left on vacation without it, Valerie only finds herself in Paris. Replongeant itself in its painful memories of enfermement in psychiatric asylum, two years earlier, it writes in three weeks the account of its internment. True cry of rage, the House of the insane children is a testimony tearing on the drama of the anorexia seen of the interior.

Left in bookstore in November 1978, the House of the insane children quickly becomes a best-seller. The media are interested quickly in this young author of earliest and the following year, on April 27th, 1979, Valerie Valère takes part in Apostrophes , the literary emission of Bernard Pivot. It is the dedication. Day at the following day, the small high-school girl with the long black hair and a little sad green eyes becomes famous.

Irony of fate and of the dates, this same evening but on another television channel (TF1), passes Pierrette , the telefilm which it turned under the direction of Guy Jorré.

In addition to glory and the fame, the House of the insane children also brings to Valerie financial independence. With its royalties, it buys an apartment, street of Buci in the 5th district of Paris, and leaves the family home.

Translated in more than 10 languages including German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and Swedish, the House of the insane children remains today still the book more known and more read of Valerie Valère.

Benefitting from the passion which surrounds its name, Valerie Valère leaves its first novel as of the month April 1979. Written in two months, Malika or a day as all the others tells the impossible love between a 10 year old little girl and her 15 years old big brother. As previously, success is with go.

Its second novel, white Obsession , appears in April 1981. Work more personal, more close friend but also more difficult of access, it does not cause same enthusiasm at the critics and the readers. This history of a young novelist shining who pains to write its second book, from where the title, désarçonne public. It is at this period (May 1981) that Jacques Chancel invites it to its emission Radioscopie .

Is followed from there one period of deep depression for Valerie Valère and massive absorption of drugs.

Taking refuge in the countryside close to Chartres, it continues nevertheless to write without slackening. Thus, it is at this period that it writes Magnificia Love , then Véra . It begins even an autobiography.

But in the night from December 18th to 19th 1982, Valerie Valère dies in her sleep, victim of a consecutive heart attack to a medicamentous overdose. She leaves several new novels and of the hundreds of unfinished pages.

According to its last wills, it is incinerated and its ashes are thrown to the sea and this, without ceremony nor parents.

Since its death, Christian de Bartillat which were its only and single editor (initially at Stock, then at Plon and finally within its own publisher) published several new novels of Valerie Valère. It was initially Laisse to cry the rain over your eyes in 1987, then Véra, Magnificia Love and various pages , the Station of despaired or the colors of dead the and finally Éléonore which is held in the medium of the theater. As always, the father is absent, the hated mother and the impossible love.

Here what says the literary critic Pierre Robert Leclercq in the edition of the Monde of June 5th, 1998: " Impossible. The word summarizes with him only happiness, the love, the life of the characters of this écrivaine died with twenty and one years and for which all was also unrealizable, if it is not a work of several thousands of pages of which this new novel. Impossibility, here, is the love of a teenager for an actor more beautiful than talented. It could be pain-killer, it is tragic, and with a cruelty, in the painting of the characters and the mediums (the theater, the college), all the more strong as humor supports it. Portraits, as that of the father who is not there and of the mother too present, are of an acuity which makes of Valerie Valère a rather rare author able to make of a subject of romantic picture story a drama without null insipidness (ED. Bartillat, 202 p.).

Of a great precocity, Valerie Valère leaves an abundant and rich work. Its premature death represents an immense loss for the French literature because it is obvious that she would have become one of the most important authors of her generation.

Talented but corroded by its demons, it is today - and well in spite of it - the icon of many teenagers. But it is necessary to go beyond this image, that of the young person écrivaine anorexic who died in 21 years, and not to stop with the only reading of the Pavillon of the insane children . As much as its autobiographical account, its novels speak about it and reveal us whole pieces of his life, its reports/ratios to the others and sound badly of living.

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