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What I simply wanted to say to you is that this ancestral age, the prehistory of humanity, we are living it right now in our postmodern civilizations. The conflict between mother and child is absolute, uncompromising, from the moment of conception: it is the mother and no one else who decides whether or not to have an abortion. One of the questions I’m most often asked by people who know about the business is: “But why didn’t your mother have an abortion? She was a doctor, she would have had the contacts.” I don’t resent the question, it occurs to them spontaneously and obviously a few seconds later they feel embarrassed. I’m not questioning the right to abortion, I’m not questioning anything, I’m just explaining.

Not only did my mother not have an abortion, but, a few years later, she reoffended; she had another child with another man, then off-loaded her daughter in circumstances rather worse than she did me (I think she literally abandoned the child or something, one way or the other the name of Ceccaldi was wiped from the records of my sister, but I’d rather be vague about it; I don’t think she would want me to talk about it).

At a certain point during pregnancy, women are often good-humored and in excellent physical condition. That’s what it must have been, I suppose; she got a kick out of being pregnant, but the breastfeeding, the diapers, no thanks.

I haven’t seen my mother many times in my life, fifteen at most, but the day she truly disgusted me was the day she told me that, in La Réunion, she had run into my old Malagasy nanny who had asked after me. She thought it was funny, inappropriate, that my old Malagasy nanny should ask her about me after thirty years; I found it incredibly touching, but I didn’t even try to explain it to her.

One senses that there is in the chaotic, absurd life of Lucie Ceccaldi something terribly, appallingly contemporary.

If only the spiritual channel-hopping; just think, in the space of a few years, I watched this woman convert from communist to Hindu and then Muslim (not counting some minor Gurdjieff-style bullshit); but even so, I got a shock in her interview with Lire to hear she now refers to herself as an “orthodox Christian.”

And most of all, of course, her absolute inability to sacrifice anything for her children; her inability to accept the fact that people die and their children live on. Anyway, things like that are pretty common nowadays, which means that Europe’s demographic decline doesn’t exactly come as bad news; but back in her day they were pretty rare.

She is, all in all, an absolutely self-centered creature of real but limited intelligence, and someone that I can’t even bring myself to hate. She’s right, for example, when she says that I was much better off with my grandmother, a woman she elsewhere calls a “hateful prole” (something that cast an interesting light on her own communist affiliation). I owe both my grandmothers many happy years of childhood; my sister, I believe, was not so lucky.

To this premature abandonment I also owe the fact that my earliest childhood was filled with images of women other than the rather repellent one of my mother. There were my grandmothers, of course; there were also my aunts, my father’s sisters, with whom I spent much more time than I ever did with my biological mother. And before words, before memories, there was my Malagasy nanny, and maybe others. People are not very particular about love, I think, we take it where we find it.

So you see the situation, in a sense, is not as serious as you imagined (I can understand that she might appear to be a monster to someone who had a tender, loving mother; but that’s not something that appears on my mental landscape). What is absolutely despicable, on the other hand, and you’re right, unprecedented, is that the reams of threats and insults from my mother come to me through the press.

For this there is no excuse; this goes beyond banal self-centeredness and becomes pure spite. A few months