Marie Chaix, a French novelist whose discovery of her father’s collaboration with pro-German fascists spurred her first book, The Laurels of Lake Constance, conveys her understanding of what moves a writer:
I think writing, or art, it comes from an injury. Something happened in your life and it opened a wound. Several times, I tried to write about what was around me. My father being on the wrong side, for one thing. I felt like I was on the wrong side, too. I think I have this guilt that’s not gone, even if I know it’s not my fault. I was a child. I was born in 1942, in the middle of wartime. What could I know? But when I was a seventeen-year-old girl, I felt exactly the same as I felt when I was ten or twenty. I will always be the daughter of a collaborator. I can’t escape that. The pain is in there, somewhere. It’s hidden. Even if I don’t see it in my everyday life…
Writers are very strange people and they need to suffer, I think. It sounds very selfish. I could write about different things, but I think what’s fascinating is that all these events are very simple, right? I don’t know if it’s true about my father, but—separations, love, and no more love. It’s so ordinary, and so all stories have it.
The Dish 