Recently, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marie NDiaye at Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore. It was a special night—NDiaye had run into a force majeure-style transit issue but no one left the event, and when she arrived, there was already a celebratory feeling in the room despite the horrid weather.

The audience’s excitement was justified: NDiaye has published many novels, stories, and plays in a career spanning back to 1985. Several of her books, including her latest, Vengeance is Mine, have been expertly translated by Jordan Stump. NDiaye’s award-winning writing is dreamy, elusive, and brilliant, shifting genres and forms, from the pseudo nonfiction Self-Portrait in Green to the claustrophobic My Heart Hemmed In. Vengeance is Mine is, to my mind, one of NDiaye’s very best novels, with a devastating plot and a continual sense of surprise. It rewards repeat reading and careful attention.

The night was gallantly hosted by Stephanie Valdez, in collaboration with Louise Quantin’s wonderful team at Albertine Books. It was my first experience of working with a simultaneous translator, Nicholas Eliott, who, as you’re about to read in this edited transcript, did an exemplary job.

Adam Dalva (AD): I think I speak for everyone when I say it’s such an honor to be here with you tonight as a longtime admirer of your work. I first read Vengeance is Mine a few months ago, and as I was preparing for this event, I kept finding more in it. It has a very sensational core. There’s a horrible crime, the killing of three children by their mother. But the lead, the mother’s lawyer, has a sequence of enigmatic interactions with the woman who cleans her house, with an ex-lover whose daughter she has an association with, with a man who may have had an influence on her childhood. She moves through these elliptical, dreamy scenes while the novel keeps beating its detective heart. Where did this idea come from?

Marie NDiaye (MN): The idea for this book came from the work that I did on the screenplay of the filmmaker and screenwriter Alice Diop’s film Saint Omer. This is a film about a woman who has killed her child. Saint Omer is specifically about a true story that happened in France about twelve years ago, I think. The work that I did with Alice Diop on that screenplay is what inspired the idea for the book. I would not have written this book without that work with Alice Diop on Saint Omer.

AD: Saint Omer and the real-life case of Fabienne Kabou have some differences from your book. In Saint Omer, the baby is left on the beach to die. There is a single child, and the mother is Black. In this book, the mother is racially enigmatic and has three children, all of whom she drowns in a tub.

MN: Yes, it’s very different. The film and the screenplay are just a source, an inspiration. Because when I was working on the film, I became very interested in these stories of infanticide mothers. I got the desire to give, in a sense, my own point of view on these stories. These stories that are about women who are fascinating, enigmatic, these cases of loving, cherishing, excellent mothers who prefer to kill their children rather than to continue to be perfect mothers.

AD: It struck me that the taboo of killing one’s child that, say, Claire Dederer’s Monsters explores, seemed to be at the margin of the book. You were, I think, more interested in finding not exactly the humanity in the character but the way her brain works. And I would love to hear about that approach.

MN: As a writer, I don’t ever place myself with a point of view about morality or ethics. I have characters whom I create, and I try to give each of these characters his or her chance. Whether he or she is likable or unlikable, whether he or she is on the side of good or evil, I try to give each of these characters his or her narrative or story. That’s what I like most about literature: that one can place oneself above any kind of judgment. It’s not my role to say, “This woman is bad or evil.” Certainly she is, for she’s a criminal, but literature’s role is not to judge. My point of view is that literature’s role is simply to present who she is and what she did, and then it’s up to each reader to make up his or her mind about who this woman is.

AD: In some ways, the novel opens like a classic detective novel: the lawyer is in her office and then a mysterious, handsome man who turns out to have a skin condition walks in and the action starts. But after that initial burst, we wait almost fifty pages to come back to the trial. I’m wondering how you draw inspiration from detective novels and also how you seem to move very far from them structurally.

MN: I read lots of detective novels when I was younger. Now they don’t satisfy me anymore as a reader, because the principle of the detective novel is that there will be a resolution. We start with mystery, enigma, all these incredible things, but the pact between the author and the reader is that the end will bring answers to every question. When I read these detective novels, I was always a little bit disappointed at the end. I was more interested in the attention to the mystery. And when the mystery was resolved, it always seemed a little bit banal, disappointing. It seemed to fall short of what that mystery had promised. When the resolution arrives, it’s like plot: there it is, but it doesn’t really take you anywhere else. What I like specifically in the novel is that when it ends, one can imagine what is happening outside the reading and the writing. There’s a kind of limbo before the beginning of the novel and after the novel ends. There’s this whole dream universe, which the writer has decided not to give access to, because he or she has chosen where to put the final period and where to start the novel. Whereas in the detective novel, I don’t think we find that. When it’s over, it’s over.

AD: There is a mystery at the heart of the novel, which is that this man with a skin condition who walks into her office may or may not have had an encounter with the protagonist when she was ten and he was fifteen. The first mystery is: is it true that anything happened? And the second mystery is: did something bad happen? There are small hints. She cuts her beautiful hair right after the incident and later refers to the incident as a cyst that needs to be removed. But I was very struck, in the beautiful profile of you in Vulture that ran earlier this week, when you said about your lead: “Perhaps she is wrong. I myself don’t know.” How does that work in your writing process?

MN: When I write, I really aim to not be more informed than the reader. I’m not a writer who knows more than the reader, who is more clever than the reader. What the reader does not know, I don’t know. For instance, take Maitre Susane’s first name. She doesn’t have one, and it’s not there before me. I don’t know it. That’s why when I’m asked questions about the meaning of a specific scene in the book, for example, I try to answer as if I were the reader of my own book. In other words, there’s no answer that I give that is linked to the fact that I’ve written it. I can have the same questions as the reader about the characters or the meaning of a scene. It often happens that literary critics or readers tell me or teach me more about my characters than what I thought I knew, and in a way more than I want to know.

AD: I’ll be careful to avoid that! In your most recent novel that was published here, The Cheffe, the protagonist’s name was also hidden. In Vengeance, the names of many characters are mysterious. What is it about names that interests you throughout your writing?

MN: I don’t know, or I can’t feel, the way, in English translation, that the name choices I made resonate. It can’t be the same, obviously. My names are very French. They’re not strange. They’re nearly ordinary, but everything is in that “nearly.” They’re ordinary, but with a very slight shift, a slight feeling of strangeness that you can’t put a finger on. For example, the name “Principaux” in French is not a bizarre name. Principaux is Principaux. It’s not exotic. It’s not strange. Except that despite all that, it’s not an ordinary name. There’s something about it, including the way that it’s written, ending in A-U-X, that gives a feeling of it just slightly being off, just slightly shifted, but barely so. It’s like the name of the book’s protagonist, Maitre Susane. Susane is her last name, and it’s a banal name. But as a family name, a last name—and written as I wrote it, with an S rather than a Z—it’s not that it’s strange, but it’s slightly off-putting, slightly disturbing.

Because it’s a first name that becomes a family name, a last name. So there’s this mix in it of, in a sense, the private person who would be Suzanne with the Z, but it’s not a private name. It’s her family name and it’s also her name as a lawyer. The character of the infanticide mother I chose to name Marlyne. This is a name that exists in France, though it’s rare, but it’s like a truncated Marilyne, a Marilyne who’s missing a letter. And maybe this truncated first name suits this character of a mother who is full of things that she is lacking.

AD: The first scene with Marlyne is one of the most extraordinary moments I’ve seen in a recent novel. It is at nearly exactly the halfway mark of the book. She has a ten-page monologue and almost all the sentences begin with the word, in English, “but.” Even later in the book, when she writes a brief note to the protagonist, it doesn’t say “I won’t meet you,” it says, “but I won’t meet you.”

MN: Yes, Marlyne has this long monologue in which nearly every sentence starts with the word “but.” A few pages later, there’s a monologue, nearly as long, by her husband, Gilles, in which each sentence starts with “because.” It was important to me that each of the two people in this couple had the right to his or her story, Marlyne with her “but” and Gilles with his “because,” and that the two stories be equal in terms of what the reader might feel. And even if one might get the impression at first glance that the “because” is authoritative, that it declares or asserts a truth unlike the “but,” which may seem more modest, more submissive, I’m not sure that’s the truth. Because Marlyne’s “but” is a “but” that seems so much more humble than her husband’s “because,” yet the “but” is actually twisted and manipulative. Because “but” is also a word that excuses the person. What comes before “but” is, yes, I did that but I had reasons. So it’s less affirmative but perhaps more clever than “because,” and less honest.

AD: The lead’s father is a great minor character. He leaves her a beautiful voicemail that says, “Adieu, my daughter” over and over, repeating words as Marlyne and Gilles do. He also says at one point that he doesn’t like mysteries, which is very funny for a character in this book. Both of the lead’s parents are representative of something that I love in your writing, the exploration of intergenerational conflict and intergenerational expectation. The parents have high expectations for their daughter. She seems to be disappointing them.

MN: Maitre Susane is what one calls today in France—I don’t know if the term exists here, a transfuge de classe, someone who crosses class barriers. A class renegade, perhaps one would say. Which means that she is from an environment that in no way predisposed her to become a lawyer, something that sociologically speaking would not allow her to become more important than her parents. This is a question that is very present in France, particularly since Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in Literature, because this is something that she talks about a lot. In fact, it’s practically all she talks about, this discomfort one feels when one has, sociologically or socially speaking, become more than one’s parents. When one has met one’s parents’ desire or expectations to be more than they are, but one still feels an unpleasant awkwardness about it. Because on both sides, the parents and the children no longer resemble each other. The parents and the children feel that a chasm has opened between them.

My character of Maitre Susane has realized her parents’ ambitions for her beyond what they could have even imagined, in that she has become someone who’s totally outside of their representation. So they have every reason to be proud of her, and they are, but they also have expectations for her that she can’t satisfy. For instance, for her to be rich, which she is not. Or to have the emblems of success, like a beautiful car, which she does not have. So she’s in an ambivalent situation vis-à-vis her parents. She’s proud and happy that she has pleased them by being a success, but she also holds it against them that they expect from her these signs of success that she can’t show, because actually she’s just a small-time provincial lawyer.

That’s why even though she loves her parents and knows they love her nearly without conditions, sometimes this love that they pour on her is so painful that she would almost prefer they were dead so that she could mourn them and no longer be subjected to their love and expectations. Which puts her in this painful tension: she would rather grieve for them than meet their expectations.

AD: We haven’t talked about Sharon, Susane’s housekeeper. What a fascinating character. In one of my favorite scenes in the book, in a moment of apology, Sharon cooks—and after reading The Cheffe, I know you are such a brilliant writer of food—she cooks a ten-dish meal that the lead feels compelled to gorge herself on, until she becomes ill.

MN: Sharon is a cleaning lady whom Maitre Susane employs, but she has no need for her. She lives in a two-room apartment. She takes care of this apartment alone perfectly well. But she has taken it to heart to employ Sharon, who needs documents to live in France. So for Maitre Susane, employing Sharon is to do good, “but” the problem is that Maitre Susane does not know how to be an employer. Her mother was a cleaning lady who was regularly mistreated and humiliated. So, Maitre Susane as a boss wants to be good, and she succeeds, in that she employs Sharon under the best conditions. But Maitre Susane also wants love as a reward for her goodness. She’s mixing things that should not be mixed. She doesn’t want to be an employer, she wants to be a friend. But the fact is, she is an employer and Sharon does not want a friend. She has no need to love or be loved by her boss. So you can’t mix this demand or need for love with the fact that you’re employing someone who’s cleaning your home. Maitre Susane doesn’t understand this. As a modern employer on the left, et cetera, she doesn’t understand that she can’t have a relationship of love and tenderness with her maid. Things don’t work that way.

Sharon does not need to love her boss or be loved by her. That’s not her business. To Maitre Susane’s more or less articulated requests, Sharon replies, “No, thank you,” which leaves Maitre Susane feeling terribly rejected. But Sharon is right to refuse this mix of serving and being friends, because that is not possible.

AD: Let’s now take some questions from the audience. 

Audience Question: As an author, is it hard to let go of your characters?

MN: No, not at all. My characters are really characters. They’re not real beings, real people. When a book is done, I forget them and think about the ones who will follow, who will come next. This is why I was always against this image of characters and books as being like your children. Not at all. Once a book is published, they no longer have a role in my life, whereas my children do. So it’s two completely different things. The characters remain characters. They are these creatures of fiction that I was infinitely close to when I put them in a novel, when I described them. But when it’s done, it’s done. They’re beings of paper, in fact.

Audience Question: I wanted to ask about your film writing. You’ve collaborated with such great filmmakers, Claire Denis and Alice Diop. I would love to hear about your approach to writing for the screen and how that’s different from your novels.

MN: It’s completely different work. The screenplay is a tool, not a work in and of itself. It’s a tool toward a work, a piece of art, let’s say, in and of itself. It’s not itself a work. So I think one must be very humble with a screenplay because once the film exists, the screenplay has no reason to be. Work with screenplays is craftsman’s work. The screenplay is a little bit like a placenta. Once the child is born, the placenta has no reason for being. I don’t like working on screenplays very much. What I like is the work with Alice Diop or, earlier, Claire Denis. A screenplay is not my way of writing. I really must make an effort to write one. Because unlike theater, cinema must seem like life. For example, with a screenplay, to make the actors feel comfortable with the text, you can’t write, “I do not know what will happen tomorrow.” You write, “don’t know what happens tomorrow.” I don’t like writing that way. It hurts me or it bothers me, but that’s work in cinema.

Audience Question: The topic of servants and bosses is also very important in your work, as with the play Hilda. I feel like you’ve been working on themes that become very, very important in the discourse, and you started thinking about them twenty years earlier. I would be very interested in what you are working on at the moment.

MN: I never have the impression that I’m working on themes. I never think of what I’m doing or what I will do in terms of a subject. I don’t say to myself, for instance, I’m going to work on a maid like in Hilda or migration as in Three Strong Women. I don’t think in those terms. But indeed, I am affected by or filled with all that happens in the world. I’m a fervent reader of newspapers. I listen to the radio a great deal. Everything that happens in the world influences and inspires what I write. But I believe that these are influences that remain unconscious. It’s never my intention to write on this or that subject.