WHEN I WAS TEN, my parents gave me a bound collection of French magazines for girls called Bernadette. In those days—the Quebec of the early sixties—the only books that came my way, with the exception of history textbooks thick with martyred Jesuits, were French books from France, so that the country of my imagination was very different from the Montreal of my reality. That this is so probably explains why I always experience a kind of luxurious swooning, a coming home to pleasure, when I read stories set in France. In any case, there was a story in Bernadette that has stayed with me all my life. And I think it stayed with me because it touched on what made me want to be a writer.
Most of the stories in the annual were illustrated, laid out like comic books, and most of them were historical in nature. I don’t remember the title of the story, but it was set in the Second Empire, and it featured three girls who went to school together. The girls were good friends even though they came from different backgrounds. There was a rich, aristocratic girl, a bourgeois girl and a poor girl. The poor girl came from a “genteel” family, but her father had died and her mother was penniless. The girls often talked about the future, and I remember their faces as lovely and pensive beneath their bonnets as they did so. The rich girl and the bourgeois girl wore cloaks, while the poor one had no bonnet and wore a shawl.
Eventually it came time for them to graduate. The girls made a pact to meet again in ten years. They were to turn up on the such and such a corner of a Paris street at a specific time on a specific day. Should they lose touch with one another over the years, they could count on this assured reunion.
I don’t remember how the years passed. But I think they passed with history lessons. On Louis Napoleon. On the Franco-Prussian war. The important thing is that years passed and everything changed.
I think the rich girl, whose family had been tied to Louis Napoléon, got poor; the poor girl married a man who inherited a fortune from an uncle; and the bourgeois girl lost her husband to a war in Mexico. The specifics don’t matter. What matters is that when you’re ten, ten years is a long time. It’s the difference between ten years old and twenty years old, and this was my first true understanding of the weight of years. It was like a stab in the heart. After reading the story, I remember feeling this poignant nostalgia for my own life, as I imagined my future self looking back at my ten-year-old self. And as I looked back on my little life, I suddenly became very scared of losing any minute of it, of forgetting anything that had happened. The idea of time passing, of change, of becoming something other than I was, filled me with dread and wonder. Like myself, the girls had had no idea what would become of them. It was so chilling not to know what was coming! And I couldn’t get over the sensation of time ruining things. All of this panicked me, but the panic was sweet and sad, and I would deliberately recall it sometimes and loll about in it, as if it were a treat of some kind.
I knew I could address this panic by hoarding my memories, and I did that. Eventually I began writing things down in journals. I spent most of my life memorizing my experience as it was happening so I could write it down in a journal, or collecting my thoughts so they wouldn’t disappear. This habit stuns me now.
I suppose anything could have started it, but it was this story in Bernadette that triggered nostalgia for life even as it is being lived. I guess that’s a kind of definition of literature. In fact, most of the novels I’ve loved have had this poignant, elegiac quality, and when I close such a novel I often say those words, time passing, and feel that sweet sadness. It’s funny, now that I’m older, I care less and less about holding on to the past. These days in my dreams I’m driving cars and the luggage is flying out the back windows. And I don’t care. I really don’t. Let it all go, I say, except for what comes back, as if from the very marrow of my bones, just before falling asleep.