OVER THE RAINBOW

Constance Joly

(Flammarion, 194 pages, 2021)

*** TRANSLATION SAMPLE ***

***awarded LE PRIX ORANGE DU LIVRE 2021***

***Longlisted for LE Prix de La Closerie des Lilas 2021***

I write so that I don’t turn the page. I write to reverse the course of time. I write not to lose you forever. I write to remain your child.

—Constance Joly, from Over the Rainbow

This is a story told by Constance, daughter of Jacques, a young, passionate Italian teacher, who adores opera, literature, and antiques and whose wife, Lucie, adores him. Reinvigorated by the spirit of protest of May ’68, the open-minded couple decides to leave the provincial town of Nice to get a taste of the effervescent Parisian atmosphere.

There Jacques finds that he can finally be himself and explore his secret desire for men. Constance was eight years old when her parents separated, and she lived alternately with her mother—crushed by the divorce and slowly sinking into depression—and the couple formed by her father and his partner, Ivan. When AIDS emerged in 1981, Jacques was one of the first gay men to be infected. Up until his death in 1991, he refused to talk about his condition, even when the symptoms of the disease became impossible to ignore. Only at the very end did Constance learn the truth.

Joly resurrects her beloved father figure with great modesty and grace. She questions what undermines his right to live his life and remembers the contemptuous asides and insulting looks that her father, and so many others, had to endure. She also describes the suffering of her mother abandoned for a man, and her loneliness as a little girl unable to grasp the period’s generalized anguish and mistrust that she writes of now.

Joly’s book is a tribute to her father, whom she addresses in moving prose, where pain, absence, and love are omnipresent. She remains staggered by the thought that she owes her life to the fact that her father repressed his homosexuality.

Over the Rainbow is a beautiful and sincere account of memory and life, and of a daughter now grown who knows what her inheritance is: freedom to be yourself despite the pressure to be anything but.

Constance Joly has been working in publishing for twenty years and lives in the Paris region. Le matin est un tigre, her first novel (Flammarion, 2019), was well received by critics and booksellers.