Les bijoux de pacotille

On June 19, 1985, at dawn, a car veered off the road and caught fire. The narrator lost her father and mother. She was eight years old.
From that point on, everything is done to ward off the absence: the warmth of a new home, compassion that is exploited, a status that protects, makes one unique, and unattainable. An almost normal childhood, except that everything leads back to emptiness. To ward it off, Céline Milliat Baumgartner picks up the thread that was left unfinished and sketches a portrait of her parents with a stump—a father often absent because of his work, a mother who, as an actress, kisses Depardieu in a Truffaut film—who, far from having abandoned her, made her who she is.