Born in Canada, Nancy Huston moved to Paris at the age of 20, where she completed her thesis under the supervision of philosopher and semiologist Roland Barthes (1915-1980). She has published numerous novels in English and French. Today, at the age of 70, she looks back on her feminist commitments, her relationship with time, her body, and the "seven decades of reality" that she now has at her disposal.

How do you envisage your death?

Death doesn't scare me. I'm not afraid of it at all. But in general, as I've long noticed, women are less afraid of death than men. It's a perennial theme in men's poetry that you don't find in women's poetry – with exceptions, of course, in both directions. I'm particularly not afraid of death because I don't believe there's anything after it. So I'm not afraid of hell, or being punished, or getting a bad grade. In short, I'm not afraid of still being here "after," because you can't "be" dead. Death is the end of being.

There's a sentence by [writer] Christian Bobin [1951-2022] that resonated with me once and for all, a very long time ago. In a text he addressed to his young friend Ghislaine, who had passed away, he said, "You're not in your death." It reassured him to know that she wasn't somewhere on the other side. You "are not" dead. That's beautiful, that's very important. A lot of the people closest to me – and a lot of the artists I feel close to – had died by my age. So, for a while now, I've been getting used to the idea that, yes, it's going to happen, that death is not a question but a fact.

Were you more afraid of it when you were younger?

No. I was suicidal for most of my life. Maybe it's an indulgence, an escape too, to think that you can always stop living. But it's always reassured me. I've always tried to imagine a way of doing things that wouldn't be violent for those close to me. Some of my loved ones have committed suicide and I've experienced their act as horrific violence. So I've sometimes had the idea of taking a bottle of Vitrex in one hand and some paper towel in the other. People would say I was just cleaning the windows and lost my balance and fell out of the window. But right now, I live in a house that's too small for that gesture to be believable.

That's a very violent death!

I love housework. On the face of it, I'd find it beautiful to die washing windows! Of course, I'm only joking. But I've been campaigning for a long time for freedom of choice in dying. If I'm bedridden, I'd rather kill myself than go to a nursing home. But I realize that's the attitude of a healthy person. The fact is, we don't know. We often change our minds when we really find ourselves in such a situation, because the body wants to live.

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