The hunger

14 July 2006

"You never really stop being the child you were, but something else comes and breaks you."

The Independent meet Amélie Nothomb.

"I never even dreamt of being a writer," says Nothomb, "because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become. I thought maybe," she continues, "I would become a god, or a goddess, or a president or a Nobel Prize winner."

[..]

Fear and Trembling ends with a series of dates - the character Amélie's departure from Japan and the publication of her first novel - which are also the dates for those events in Nothomb's life. Loving Sabotage, about a child's experience of love and cruelty in China, ends with an afterword, insisting that the novel is a "true story: my own. I invented nothing," insists the author, "not even the names of the characters". It seems a slightly odd thing to do. Surely, I point out, all fiction is a mish-mash of acquired experience and the borrowed experiences of others? Does it matter whether it's literally true?

"Not at all. But my readers ask me all the time, they're obsessed with that. For me, even my fictions are true stories. That very great sentence of Virginia Woolf - 'nothing happens until you write it down'... When I write fiction I have the same feeling. I wrote it so it happened... In 2000," she adds "something really great happened to me. They put me in the French dictionary! 'Amélie Nothomb, writer, born in 1967'. But it became a disease. Because now, very often when I am in my office in Paris or my apartment, I think..." - she gasps dramatically - "I'm very ashamed of what I shall tell you, 'am I still existing, am I still in the dictionary?', so I take my dictionary and think 'oh yes I am'. Sometimes I go to the big bookshops and I look at the first dictionary, second dictionary, third dictionary. Am I crazy or something?"