The Woman I Thought I Knew
Walking home from the market, I heard a voice I recognised, and discovered I'd only ever known half of Leïla Slimani
I know her. Or I thought I knew her.
We read Lullaby in the MyFrenchLife™ book club, Chanson douce in French, Lullaby in English, and some of us in both languages. Those opening words. You don’t forget them. You don’t forget what they do to you. And I’d been carrying my picture of Leïla Slimani ever since: Prix Goncourt, Macron’s personal emissary for the French language, the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize.
A fortnight ago last Tuesday, I was walking home from the market with both hands full, baskets heavy, fresh vegetables and heaps of tomatoes; it was a cooler day, but the sun in my eyes, the general difficulty of being a person with too many things to carry, and a podcast started. I hadn’t chosen it deliberately. It just began, the way they do when your phone decides for you, and I couldn’t stop to look because of the tomatoes and because I was concentrating on not dropping anything.
I heard “Morocco,” and then I heard “Paris”.
A woman’s voice, unhurried and precise. She was a little amused at herself, describing what it felt like to arrive in Paris at seventeen, completely alone, standing on a terrasse watching Parisian women move through their day. She said she was feeling lost. In Morocco, she said, beauty takes hours: the salon, the caftan, the jewellery, and everyone understands this. But Parisian women looked effortless, and she couldn’t decode it. She felt stupid. She also felt unfashionable. She found a vintage shop because she couldn’t afford anything else.
I slowed down… I was walking through the park.
She said that in Paris she watches from the terrasse as a writer. She watches all the details. How a woman carries her bag. How you go out into the world, and you read the details, in what is worn and what is hidden underneath. And I thought: I know this voice.
It was Bella Freud’s podcast. You know how I love Bella. I’ve mentioned her here before; you know… that quality she has of sitting with someone until they say the thing they didn’t plan to say. And her guest, on this particular Tuesday morning, was talking about a coat.
She said she’d been working at the Villa Medicis in Rome. She woke one morning feeling depressed. And when she walked out into the street, she watched the Roman women moving through their city with that particular Roman ease, and she wanted to be one of them. She went into a Max Mara shop, and she was taken by the colour Sienna. She bought something that doesn’t crease when you travel. And she told herself: " You deserve it. Go and buy it.”
I don’t know why that made me stop on the footpath. Maybe because I’d been carrying a certain picture of her all these years, and this- what I was hearing felt different. This was a woman on a difficult morning in a foreign city, alone, and she seemed to be giving herself permission.
And then I knew. It came to me the way things do sometimes when you’re not looking. Leïla Slimani. Of course it was.
What happens next is the part I didn’t see coming. The mother. The father with no passport. The thing he said to her before she left. And the question she asks herself, sitting in front of a blank page that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since.
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