Très Intime – Solange
Payot – €15
www.payot-rivages.net
Solange, aka Ina Mihalache, known for her entertaining, hard-hitting “Solange te parle” web videos, published her collection of testimonials Très Intime last February. The book exposes the sexual intimacy of twenty women, with a crudeness of language and outspokenness that is unashamedly frank, and forces out areas of silence – which are ultimately intended to be “liberating”. This compilation, based on radio interviews conducted in 2015, was never intended to become a book. Today, the book has given birth to a controversy surrounding several of these women, who claim not to have been informed of the book’s publication. While many articles have questioned the moral and ethical dimensions of the book’s publication, I’ve decided here to examine the book, its aims and the author, rather than the controversy surrounding it.
As the perfect daughter of the virtual, and she likes to call herself that, Solange interviews “women with whom she didn’t have to struggle to get them to talk”. Cast right and left on networks and blogs, sometimes recommended by third parties, they were all generous and expansive, and “rolled up their sleeves” – during these three hours of interview – to dive back into their sex stories and energetically tell Solange about the great joys, the turmoil and the splashes too of their sex parties in the air.
The author is captivated and amazed by the honesty of the issues surrounding the body and intimacy. Without anticipation, using a direct, empirical approach, Solange has to come to grips with this third group of abused, sometimes raped, women. From that moment on, she felt invested, charged, with a human mission to restore confidence and revive power – through words.
Solange is relentless in her questioning, tracking down details, sparking off complementary discourses, and has only one desire: “to understand the concrete” – without any cuts in reality. For her, confession is “out of time and space”, naturally liberating. Under the guise of a fair, subtle modesty, all the words are adult, and they’re all there. A veritable “poetry of crudity”, some readers are embarrassed, while others gorge themselves on this exhilarating, liberated verbality. For “elles s’y sont allées”, that was the contract, that was their challenge.
(You’ll find the author’s answers to my questions in the audio track below).
Elisa Palmer. How did you select these 20 women? What were your selection criteria?
EP. Is this ease with ass questions innate or acquired?
EP. What were your objectives behind this book? Shake things up? To question sexual myths and preconceived ideas about sexuality? Map out the different possible relationships between a woman and her sexuality? To remind us of silent abuse and trauma?
EP. Why this age range of 18 – 46? Do you plan to do a book that interviews older women, or even younger women?
EP. Would you be interested in the sexuality of menopausal women, perhaps as the subject of a second book?
EP. What are your next artistic and literary projects? Would you like to tell us a little about them?
EP. What are the feelings that regularly animated you during and after these testimonies? Modesty? Kindness? Questioning? Compassion? Gratitude? …
EP. Did you have a list of specific questions before each interview? Or do questions arise more spontaneously in your discussions with these women?
Thanks again to Solange.
Elisa Palmer
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