Unfnished

I don’t care how much work I have and how hard my boss is breathing down my neck. This is just too terrible to ignore.

Nelly Arcan, 35, an author and public figure here in Québec is dead. And I can’t get her out of my head.

She touched me with her novel, Putain (Whore). Not so much because of the content, i.e., the story, mostly autobiographical, of a university student who turns to prostitution to quell an insatiable desire to seduce, and secondarily to pay off school, but because of its larger implications. Sounding the bell for a sort of impalpable and generalized suffering experienced by most women in a culture that consumes women’s bodies like cupcakes, sweet and tasty, but over-with after a couple of bites, Nelly Arcan was the writer of her own passion, bearing the torch as courageously and intelligently as she possibly could, scratching incessantly below the surface, and if not making the wound larger, at least making it somewhat tolerable…

In her last on-line column with local newspaper ICI, there is no sign of a tormented being on the verge of suicide. Rather, she jokingly talks about a sangria-filled afternoon with a friend, and of the huge detour the friend drags her on so as to avoid the revolting fish smells of the local Portuguese market. The writing is witty, as usual, bemused, even funny, evoking the evolutionary riddle of how it has come to be that the smell of someone else’s fart always causes serious, grounds-for-break-up repulsion, and yet how one can luxuriate in one’s own gluey stench in front of the TV for hours without thinking twice about it.

…

And if I could talk to her, I would say, Nelly, it’s okay, you don’t have to be afraid of looking normal, of being alone, of not having children, even of that bottomless pit of a wound that you have that miraculously transforms itself into a voice, a lovely voice, one that speaks the truth, and sees clearly, and makes women proud of you; you don’t have to go that way down the path of eternal unforgiveness of yourself and non-acceptance and loneliness and being misunderstood. You can leave it behind, by choice, you can laugh yourself out of it, you can have more sangria with your friends, keep on trying to teach moronic interviewers, who live intellectually above their means, how to think; French-kiss girls just for the hell of it cuz you ran out of smokes; get all the guys in the bar to armwrestle with you so you can show off how strong you’ve become with your personal trainer and time at the gym; it’s all good. You do not have to die. You don’t. Please don’t. You’re too talented, and wonderful, and yourself. And your death will make me weep at my computer because you didn’t deserve it. Not you. Even though you did it to yourself. You didn’t deserve the way the eternal magazine covers freaked you out in the end, making you think you were nothing, making you think you only deserved to disappear into nothing, because you weren’t good enough, because the viscera of being trapped under your skin finally got you. If that is what it is that got you. Because, I don’t know obviously. And no one can. But there is my echo to your suffering, which of course always, always comes too late.