The woman of letters, images and combat haunted by the ghosts of her history and that of her century, died on July 26 in Paris.
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Woman of letters, each book of which can be read as a profession of faith in literature and “shamanic” power of words. Woman of images too, passionate about cinema, which she taught, and photography, which she practiced as an enlightened amateur. Woman of engagement and combat to promote reading, convinced that the imagination is “unparalleled good” and “transmission a political question”. Anne-Marie Garat was all that. And more. A wonderful storyteller, haunted by the ghosts of her history and that of her century, for whom the novel was an inexhaustible “stories machine”, open to all possibilities. The members of the Jury Femina, of which she has been a part since 2014, announced her death in Paris on July 26. Aged 75, she had pancreatic cancer.
born in Bordeaux, on October 6, 1946, in an impasse from the popular district of Chartrons, the little girl was raised within a family – her father was a worker in a chocolate factory, her mother seamstress – where the only books are textbooks, for lack of money. It is at the loan library that this “gluttony reader” will satisfy her bulimia, as she relates it with flavor in black mood (Actes Sud, 2021). Tales from Perrault – Much later, she will offer an exciting rereading of the little red riding hood in a wolf’s hunger (Actes Sud, 2004) -, novels of the “Rose Library”, of the “Green Library”, Illustrated Journals, BD, Sorter on the radio … Nothing seems to satisfy his cravings of stories. So the little girl begins to write, without any other ambition than to tinker with a little world, for her only. “With us, writers it does not exist. At school, they are prestigious but deceased people: nothing enviable. Write, nothing allows it, invites it,” she writes still in mood .
To this devouring passion is added that for cinema, in particular thanks to his father. She becomes a subscriber of the film club in her neighborhood where, with the same greed as for literature, she sees everything in Trac Westerns, war films, gangsters, comedies, melodrames, so many films that will populate her imagination and her books . Bac in pocket, in the effervescence of May-68, the dazzled student as much by the new novel as the new wave naturally turns to what “electrifies” its existence: letters and cinema, which it teaches d ‘First of all in Périgueux then, from the 1980s, at the Experimental Lycée in Montgeron (Essonne) where, in an intellectual and artistic bubbling, she will know her best years.
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