I never left anybody. It was him that left me
'Michel Houellebecq, France's most shocking novelist, made his name with tales of dysfunctional, estranged relationships. Now his own mother, portrayed as a sex-obsessed hippy in one of his books, has launched a devastating counter-attack in a new memoir. Here the foul-mouthed Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, grants her first British interview to Angelique Chrisafis
In the corner of a Sri Lankan canteen in northern Paris, sits a wrinkled, 83-year-old hippy with her hair in scarlet plaits. Lucie Ceccaldi might look like a harmless, peace-loving old dear, but France is wondering if this foul-mouthed, poison-tongued pensioner is the nation's worst ever celebrity mother.
Ceccaldi's son is Michel Houellebecq, France's most successful contemporary writer, an award-winning, ageing enfant terrible whose nihilistic, deliberately shocking novels have seen him hailed as a genius. Philip Larkin spoke for most writers when he said: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But Houellebecq's disgust for his "old slut of a mother" goes far beyond that. When Ceccaldi abandoned him to his grandparents as a baby so she could go travelling across Africa with her husband, the rejection shaped his whole oeuvre. In his international bestseller Les Particules élémentaires - translated as Atomised - he created one of modern French literature's vilest mothers, a selfish, sex-obsessed hippy called "Ceccaldi" who leaves her young son in an attic in his own excrement then dumps him so she can enjoy free-love life in a bizarre cult. Elsewhere, he described the "fundamental psychic flaw" his mother caused in him. He hasn't spoken to her for 17 years. He once told an interviewer she was dead.
But now Ceccaldi has emerged from her beach-hut on the French Indian ocean island of La Réunion and today publishes her own memoir answering back. She calls her son an "evil, stupid little bastard" adding that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame."
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by FourthBase » Sun Aug 17, 2008 2:32 am 
