Talking To Deborah Levy: As If

Autobiographic writing & Where it leads | The Muse Letter No. 101

Marcelle Sauvageot’s  Laissez-moi: Commentaire

It’s Spring without you. It’s the green leaves emerging and the air tasting like fresh cut cucumbers: moist, cold, pure. I want to put them in a gin and tonic to drown.

I walk by a bookshop and find a used version of Marcelle Sauvageot’s  Laissez-moi: Commentaire. I pay 4€ and read it the whole afternoon at Schillerpark. The lilacs are slouching forward filling the air with their rich sweet scent, I break off a few branches to bring home.

Sauvageot wrote letters to her ex-lover, her ex-fiancé while impatiently trying to heal from tuberculosis and a broken heart at a Sanatorium. She never sends them. Instead, she publishes them. Writing about real people is always cruel. They don’t have a chance to answer.

So I guess this is revenge.

3 years later. Another Spring. Another you. Another broken heart. I remember Sauvageot. And I write it all down. All those you’s. All of it. The whole Heartbreak Hotel. I decorate the rooms. I turn them into one.…