‘My mother didn’t love me enough’ says French writer Houellebecq

Paris (AFP) – Controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq admitted Tuesday that the bleakness at the heart of his work was because his mother didn’t love him enough.

“When I was a baby my mother didn’t cradle or caress me enough. She simply wasn’t sufficiently tender, that’s all,” the author of “Atomised” and “Platform” wrote of himself in a newly published appraisal of his work.

“It explains everything else, my personality, the most painful parts anyway,” he said in the book, which also includes tributes to his work penned by fellow novelists Salman Rushdie and Julian Barnes as well as the rock star Iggy Pop.

Although Houellebecq later played down the emotional privations of his childhood in an interview on French public television, his relations with the hippy doctor he once branded “my old slut of a mother” were notoriously bad.

The assessment of the provocative polymath’s novels, poetry, films and music by the prestigious French Herne imprint appeared on the same day that his publisher Flammarion issued a 1,500-page volume of his collected works.

Herne usually limits itself to taking stock of the work of dead writers.

Houellebecq also said he was going to “stop writing political books” after the furore over his last novel, “Submission” which imagined the election of a moderate Islamist as president of France in 2022.

“Submission” was published the same day jihadists attacked the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satirical magazine in Paris in January 2015, killing 12 people including one of the writer’s closest friends.

– Under police protection –

Having been accused of stirring tensions, Houellebecq went into hiding after the attacks under armed police guard.

“I am finished with all that (politics),” Houellebecq told France 2. “I think that feelings are the most important thing,” he added, saying his next novel is about love.

Far from taking a grim view of human nature, he said a lot of his books were about couples whose relationships don’t quite succeed.

Houellebecq argued that jihadism was a “revolutionary movement which like all such movements will exhaust itself, although there will be a lot of carnage on the way.”

Despite his declaration that he was going to steer clear of politics, he could not resist a pop at the centrist French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron.

Having admitted that he liked former rightwing president Nicolas Sarkozy “a lot”, he said he found Macron, a former economy minister, “bizarre. A bit of a mutant. I don’t know where he is coming from. I can’t get a handle on him.” 

Houellebecq’s mother Lucie Ceccaldi packed her son off to live with his grandparents when he was five so she could go travelling around Africa.

She returned to haunt him when he had become the enfant terrible of French literature with a 2008 memoir in which she described him as an “evil, stupid little bastard”.

“This individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame,” she added.

Whatever his late mother’s invective, Houellebecq is the most-read living French novelist outside France, and the only one to have given their name to an adjective, Houellebecquian.