Philippe Besson

For a long time, I tried to write down words about his disappearance. I found a lot. I even classified them in alphabetical order, if you want to know: “abandonment,” “absence,” “death,” “departure,” “dissolution,” “erasure,” “escape,” “extinction,” “flight,” “loss,” “retreat,” “vanishing,” “withdrawal,”—the other ones I forgot.

I am an exemplary student, one who never misses a class, who almost always gets the best grades, who is the pride of his teachers.

I’m a student in terminal C at the Lycée Elie Vinet de Barbezieux.

twilight—the hour we call “between a dog and a wolf.”

He says that he lives in Lagarde-sur-le-Né. I know the village; my grandmother died there.

No one can say: “I know this place, I can point to it on a map,” except perhaps for the readers (and they are more and more rare) of Jacques Chardonne, a Barbezieux native who in his writing extolled the town’s implausible “happiness.”

rock band Téléphone

French teen romantic comedy La Boum, which every teenager knew by heart

Films by François Truffaut, André Téchiné, Claude Sautet, scandalous films too, like The Wounded Man by Patrice Chéreau and Possession by Zulawski.

I don’t know at the time that the writer Hervé Guibert will become an important writer for me.