« Écrire sa vie » by Pauline Bayle, extracts

“We sometimes find ourselves becoming someone else when talking to others. (…) There’s a tension between the fear of never being understood, of never finding the right word to escape our solitude, and the desire to try.” Following the roads that lead to self-discovery, Pauline Bayle, the current director of the Théâtre Public de Montreuil, continues her exploration of stories of initiation and other bildungsromans. Drawing from the work of Virginia Woolf, she follows the fate of a group of friends, and shows in a single movement the wonder of childhood and the disillusions of adulthood. Through the voices of those characters appears the portrait of an author who found in friendship and writing two antidotes to escape the inexorable character of the human condition. A luminous re-reading of the great work of the English author's immense work.