Leila Slimani says she, “...wanted to give her own vision of what it is to be a maid or nanny today...I spoke with my own nanny but did not ‘interview’ her in the proper sense of the term...What was very difficult to write was to write about everyday life. The nanny by herself is a very classical character. In France you have much classical literature about domestics...when you read those books, each time has a different way of describing domestics...The job of a nanny is very repetitive...very trivial and it was very difficult to find something dynamic for this book. That is when I decided to put violence...to put murder.”
Slimani’s book “Chanson Douce” won her several awards and catapulted her to international fame, “So many people from so many countries coming to you and saying, thank you...for telling a story...I feel so grateful and so fully charged...My children and mother keep me grounded. Even if I call my mother from San Francisco, she says, ‘Oh I know all about your interviews and book...and she brings me back to the need of the day’.…”
Slimani asserts, “When you write you don’t write for some one or as an act of generosity...you write in loneliness and you write for yourself. It is an act you do in intimacy. You don’t think what the reader will think when he is going to read you...I write when I am totally lonely. You live with your character. He populates you...I remember a story about Tolstoy. When he wrote Anna Karanin, his editor gave him lots of money to do so. The editor was waiting and waiting for Tolstoy’s manuscript and it did not come. Finally he took a train to go and see Tolstoy. Tolstoy told him, ‘Anna Karenina left. I am waiting for her.’ The editor exclaimed, ‘Are you kidding me!’ But that is totally true. When you write a book you are living with the character who is telling you what to do...it is something magical...you live with someone who is telling you the story and one day he disappears...”
Slimani continues, “What is amazing is that the relationship of the writer and the reader is through solitude...when two solitudes meet...Reading is a lonely act too...you are alone with your feeling...”
Slimani’s nanny is “white”, “I like to make glimpsing references to identity in an ironic tone because I don’t think we are defined by it...I don’t know what identity is. I am incapable of telling you who I am...literature is here to tell us that reality is much more complex...Sometimes immigrants are rich and sometimes white people are nannys or poor. It is important to get out of the cliché that white people are rich and immigrants, poor...”
Slimani describes how the nanny feels an “outsider” and lonely, as the only white nanny, when she goes to the park and finds all other nannys in their own cultural groups.
