Please don’t forget that I love you is the last piece of fiction that Gaétan Soucy wrote. A long love letter from a middle-school teacher to one of his female students. The text doesn’t present us with a feminine ideal, but rather a human one… with all the fragility and capacity to suffer for others that it implies. Nothing is more fascinating than an author’s correspondence. And Gaétan Soucy knew that well. He toys with his readers with this letter, envisaging all possibilities. Romantic misery has seldom been so well formulated, with the infinite mirroring of someone who sees himself watching himself writing, and observes the subject of his text. Like an archeologist in love, he notes the pain and predicts every argument the girl he is writing to could use to oppose it. This book confirms Gaétan Soucy’s artistry. Due to his death, in July 2013, it has become a tribute, with the participation of Pierre Jourde, Catherine Mavrikakis, Sylvain Trudel and Suzanne Côté-Martin, who agreed to play the literary game of imagining the girl’s reply. For Gaétan Soucy had also written a reply, which he had intended to flesh out, but his untimely death brought that project to a sudden halt. The other authors were invited to pay a final tribute to him by writing in response to his voice.

A powerful and moving letter. Gaétan Soucy’s immense talent bends words to his will.