Psychopompe ("Psychopomp") is undoubtedly Amélie Nothomb's most personal text, and also her riskiest. With her new book, the novelist delivers an "avian autobiography" in which she proclaims her love of birds, making flight and falling the obsessions that have always set her in motion. She defines style as all the techniques an author develops to "prevent their sentence from falling." Most importantly, she recalls several episodes when she herself almost plummeted, literature becoming the force that kept her a little above the void.

Because it took me a long time to realize it. First, it took the attack I experienced when I was 12 and my period of anorexia: That was my first experience of psychopomp. At that point, I killed someone inside me and brought back the remains, which are before you today. Then it was time to start writing, and just as it took the dinosaur 300 million years to start flying, it took time for my writing to resemble something. Recently, I published Soif (Thirst), then Premier Sang (First Blood): People told me I'd written the son and the father. All that was missing was the Holy Spirit, i.e. the psychopomp, which is usually represented by a bird.

The first time I spoke about it was in 2004. Reactions were either absent or abominable. One gentleman said, "I'm disappointed, give me the details." A very prominent literary critic told me: "If it's not true, it's very clever." Today, we're in the post [#MeToo] world. I don't know if this world is better, but at least we know we don't say such things. And for me, coming from the world before, these few lines were already a big deal. I was at the end of my tether, at the limit of what I could say. If I said any more, I'd be describing pain, and I'm incapable of writing about pain. When I was little, suffering was something we didn't talk about at home. Suffering was impolite. I remember this attack very well, I have the memory and the sensations, but at the time it was not the subject of any comment, it was struck with unreality. The witnesses remained silent, except for my mother, who said, "Poor little thing." It wasn't much, but for years it was the only guarantee that the assault had taken place. In the 2000s, my therapist said to me, "You know, your testimony is enough," and that was very important. I would never have believed that I was a credible witness.

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