Leila Slimani fuses imagination and memory in novels inspired by her French Moroccan family
When Leila Slimani won the 2016 Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, she became the first Moroccan woman to win the prize — and it catapulted her to literary stardom.
Published in English translation as The Perfect Nanny, her prize-winning book is an artful thriller about a caregiver who murders her employer's children. It's currently being adapted into a limited series starring Nicole Kidman and Maya Erskine.
Slimani followed this success with something very different. Inspired by the story of her Moroccan grandfather and French grandmother, her 2020 novel, In the Country of Others, is the first volume of a planned trilogy — an intergenerational family saga that begins in Morocco just after the Second World War.
Her new novel, Watch Us Dance, picks up the story in an independent Morocco in the late 1960s and early '70s — a time when political repression and social optimism were coming head to head.
Slimani lives with her family in Lisbon, but remains active in Moroccan life, having spearheaded a movement to decriminalize sex outside of marriage, as well as abortion. Her 2017 non-fiction book, Sex and Lies, gives voice to some of the women she's met through this work.
Slimani spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from New York City.
Being French Moroccan
"It's very difficult for me to have a certain feeling of belonging. I don't feel I belong to anywhere. When I'm in Morocco, I feel very close to this country. It has a particular place in my heart. This is the country of my childhood, the country of my first [memories] and my first sensation. But at the same time — and it's my mother who put it [this] way — Morocco is like a man whom I'm deeply in love with, but I know he will never love me as much as I love him. It's like a very sad love story that I have with Morocco.
"With France, it's probably a little bit the same. I lived in France for 22 years, but after so many years, I was still feeling like an immigrant and like an Arab. I couldn't find roots in this country.
It's very difficult for me to have a certain feeling of belonging. I don't feel I belong to anywhere.- Leila Slimani
"I'm crazy about Morocco, but at the same time, people would easily judge me because I am sometimes very critical against this country, because I'm not religious, because I'm a very free woman. So it's difficult for me to find my place there. I love being there, but at the same time I suffer a lot when I'm there.
"Now I'm living in Portugal, just in the middle between my two countries. Maybe that's the place I'm supposed to be — the place of a foreigner, the place of a stranger. I think that's my identity."
Identity and family inspiring stories
"In my head, in my mind, my family story was already a novel. I have a very weird relationship to reality. Reality is already a fiction for me. My grandmother was my grandmother, but she was at the same time a character in the story I was telling myself. The same goes for my grandfather and for my father.
I could feel in my own family a lot of contradiction, a lot of friction, also tension. And maybe that's why I needed to to write about it, to try to understand, 'how did it work?'- Leila Slimani
"Maybe it's because all of them were very mysterious to me. There were a lot of things that I didn't understand about them, and about the relationship they have between each other. My grandmother, for instance, was the incarnation of French values. She was a Catholic. She had certain values that were very different from the ones my father had.
"I could feel in my own family a lot of contradiction, a lot of friction, also tension. Maybe that's why I needed to to write about it, to try to understand, 'how did it work? How was it possible that we all lived together and we loved each other?'"
Beauty of memory and imagination
"I don't know everything about my grandparents, or my parents, or even my own stories. I'm trying to fill the void with my imagination, with fiction, with what people could call lies, but I think that we're all telling ourselves a story in our head.
It's impossible to completely separate reality from fiction.- Leila Slimani
"The story of ourselves, the story of where we come from, the story of what we are. We all do that all the time. We fill the void with fiction, and sometimes we don't really know what is true and what is invention. But at the same time, that's the beauty of literature, memory and the human condition — that reality and fiction always work together. It's impossible to completely separate reality from fiction."
Themes of politics in Watch Us Dance
"[The late 1960s] was a very exciting period because it was a turning point in Moroccan history. The end of the 1960s is marked by a very deep and violent generation conflict. Young people all around the world were questioning the values of their parents. But also in Morocco, there was a new generation — the generation of my parents — who studied abroad, who read Marx and Mikhail Bakunin. And they wanted to change the system and to modernize it. It was a time of joy, a time of freedom, a time of hope for them.
Morocco is like a man whom I'm deeply in love with, but I know he will never love me as much as I love him.- Leila Slimani
"But it was also a moment of repression. When [King Hassan II] understood that this younger generation was going to challenge his power, he installed a very repressive and violent regime. The students were gagged and strikes multiplied, poverty increased. This moment was really the end of the carefree '60s. I wanted to explore this moment when you pass from a time of hope and joy to a repression time."
Giving voice to women everywhere
"This question is important for me and not only when it concerns Moroccan women. It's a universal question that I feel is absolutely fundamental — the possibility and the necessity for women to own their own bodies. I suffered from that so much as a child and as a teenager, and I witnessed so many women suffering from that. I've heard so many stories about women having an abortion secretly and dying of it, about women giving birth to a child and being forced to abandon it.
"All those tragedies traumatized me. I know what's behind all the speeches about morality and virtue and the desire of men to control the bodies of women. I see the blood, I see the tears, I see the tragedy.
"For me it's very, very important not only in Morocco, but everywhere. And I think that as long as any woman will suffer from that, and as long as we continue to have women who don't have the possibility to own their own body, I will fight for them, of course."
Leila Slimani's comments have been edited for length and clarity.
