It’s the 60s. The Cantal, a rural, mountainous region. A family (Marie-Hélène Lafon’s) has settled in the remote Santoire Valley. There are three children: Isabelle, Claire and Gilles (seven, five and four years old) with their parents. Their farm is far from anything.

Although from her very first novel, Marie-Hélène Lafon has never made anything up, she has still never drawn on her own personal history as deeply as for Les Sources. She depicts the harsh life of the mother of this family in her thirties and the everyday violence she undergoes from her husband. One day, after months of inner reflections, she decides to leave. Divorce is not that usual in those days and this decision sounds like a real earthquake in the family’s well-established routine and social standards.

Les Sources is made of three distinct parts: the mother’s stream of consciousness (June 1967) and the way she relentlessly ponders over the disaster of her marriage. Then, a whole part is dedicated to the father (May 1974) and the way he expresses with his own words – those of a simple man – what he felt while being abandoned. The last part – a very short one – is set in October 2021: Claire, the youngest girl, pays a very last visit to the farm in she was brought up and which she is about to sell on that same day.

Les Sources is a novel. In it, Marie-Hélène Lafon reinvents the lives of those closest to her. There lies the power of writing: imagining what might have been frees her from the past.