Title: What I can tell you about them - Anne Icart - book
Summary :
Guardian and witness of family history – a story of women, sisters, mothers – Blanche will reweave all the threads to try to repair the broken bond with her own daughter, Violette...
One morning, very early. The phone rings. Blanche doesn't like it: early morning phone calls never bode well. This time, however, it's good news: Violette gave birth to a little boy during the night. Blanche is devastated: she didn't even know her daughter was pregnant. And then a boy, the first at the end of this line of girls, what a story... On the train taking her from Toulouse to Paris, nervous as she is, Blanche rereads the moleskin notebooks intended for Violette where, going back in time, she tried to remember everything, everything she could tell her about them. But is Violette still waiting for her at the end of this road, both happy and bumpy?
Carried by an ultra-sensitive writing style, where beneath the apparent gentleness of the family cocoon rumbles the violence of feelings, we are drawn into the story of Blanche, that of four generations of women, from the 1950s to the present day. From the tiny shack in a small village in the Pyrenees to the workshops of the Balaguère haute couture house in Toulouse, Blanche recreates this small world that the accidents of life, and certain choices, have made almost exclusively female. First there is Anna, the grandmother, who raised her three granddaughters, Angèle, Justine and Babé, who were deprived of a mother at an early age. Angèle, Blanche's mother, the magnificent, brilliant and so fragile Angèle, a journalist at The Midi Dispatch ; Justine the independent, the feminist, the seamstress with nimble fingers who, starting from nothing, will create her own house and become the darling of the elegant women of Toulouse; the sweet and valiant Babé, pillar of this very unconventional family in which Blanche grows up. Without a father (he died before she was born) but with three mothers, before becoming, in turn, the mother without a man of Violette...
Warm and colorful like a walk in the Pink City (or like a collection of Justine...), the novel of this tribe of women emancipated before their time explores with as much tenderness as acuity all the complexity of maternal bonds.
