Houellebecq also talks for the first time in detail about his parents, answering his mother, who recently published her own book calling him a “stupid little bastard”.In a literary scandal that gripped France, she took to the airwaves to heap insults on her son, who she gave to his grandparents to raise when he was a baby.
Houellebecq says he has only ever seen his mother about 15 times, and she conjured up a more radical “wickedness” than the “worst mothers in modern literature”. He said his friends, on reading her attacks against him, asked why she had not simply had an abortion instead of giving birth to him. He calls her an “absolutely egocentric creature, of real although limited intelligence” and says he cannot even manage to hate her.
It might be that never having a mother “reinforces” one, he writes, but in a way that he would not wish on anyone: one can never take love for granted, and one has difficulty believing in it, remaining a kind of “enfant sauvage”, never serene, never tame, “always ready to bite”. He saw his mother’s book and press tour as being the media’s attempt to get at him.
Houellebecq talks about his mother
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