Bleu Moche Blues

I'll take the blame, but didn't I say I'd tell you everything, in complete transparency?

I'm not very comfortable with this novel I wrote a long time ago, at a time in my life when I was really not doing well, when nothing was going right. I was hanging around at home, unemployed, with no prospects, and I kept going over the reasons why I had left the police force – because I used to be a police officer – and, above all, I kept going over the reasons that had led me to become a police officer in the first place. None of it was me, nothing was me anymore, I was sinking into a kind of depression that didn't have a name, and I wanted to spit it out, throw it away, vomit it out so it would stop poisoning me.

That's what triggered me to write this novel, the urge to vomit.

In this novel, I whine, I complain, I play the tortured poet, and that's painful for me today. But in this novel, I also say some really beautiful things. There are pages in this book that I'm very proud of, like the ones where I talk about the package my mother sent me while I was in Pakistan, alone and lost. Pages where I talk about depression, about the slow path that leads us to the idea of suicide. And other pages that contain flashes of brilliance and bursts of poetry.

But for the most part, I'm a little ashamed of this novel today. It's too intimate. Too personal. I feel completely naked and exposed to the eyes of the whole world. I could unpublish it, you might say, but that would be worse. The shame would win out, and the idea of giving in to shame would feed an even greater shame. No, it's ruined.

My luck is that no one reads this novel. No one buys it. It's there, available, sitting on a shelf, ready to mortify me. It taunts me. Someone will find it and discover my nakedness. But who? Years have passed without anyone finding it, so I don't think it will happen anymore. This book doesn't make me as nervous as it used to. It's just a mistake you made once, and it haunts you less and less often, less and less violently as time goes by.

But I wrote a book. I know how to write a book, it's simple: you write one sentence after another. One page after another. After a while, it hits you: you've written a book. The mistake is in wanting to write a book. If the goal is to write a book, it will all seem tedious, incredibly long and boring.

But if you want to write what you think, or feel, or imagine, on one page, then on another, then you might end up writing a book. I wrote a rather mediocre book that is of little interest except to my fans (who I don't have) or my biographers (who I will never have), which definitely makes it a book of no interest.

That leaves my children. I don't know if they've read it; we don't talk about it. I think they have, but a kind of shared modesty prevents any mention of it. After all, what child is comfortable with their father standing there completely naked? And what father wants to talk about his anatomy with his children?

Are they ashamed of this book, like me? Do they say to themselves, ‘I hope no one ever finds this book while we're alive’?

I don't know. And then there's that moment in my life that I talk about explicitly in this book. I should have started by telling you about that. My children could discover by reading this book that I was abused as a child. You can't get any more naked than that, any more intimate, any more dangerously personal. I talk about the emptiness it created in me, but one day I will explain to my children that this emptiness allowed joy to settle, grow and blossom within me.