​

It is always easier to write about others than about yourself. It is not that I am so fond of myself. In my eyes, I have a normal petty-bourgeois life. The very fact that I am writing this on a rather expensive couch in a house I own in a suburb on a Wednesday afternoon off from my reasonably paid job is illustrative.

When I was sixteen the idea was to conquer the world: to be a professor in literature at a prestigious American or British university, or a writer renting an attic room in Paris living off scraps and microwaving my food. My would-be lover would be a language enthusiast, a famous actor or a published author and I would have my muse beside me forever.

Of course, my life turned out to be different. 

​

In high school I studied languages: in a few years, I fell in love with both Latin and my language teacher. I started reading Kafka, Beckett and Wilde. I felt like I could conquer the world and went to university to study English.

The first two years were dreadful: grammar and lists and lists of authors, a few rather shallow readings of novels here and there and my newly made friends dropping out - out of disinterest and because of failing exams. The vast amount of titles and the speed with which the discussions were handled, made me weep. They made us encyclopedias of English literature.

Somewhere in that long list were Oscar Wilde - my high school sweetheart-, and James Joyce.

Little did I know at the time that he would make my heart beat faster only two years later. What made the imminent change for me was a course on modernist literature during my third academic year. This was exactly what I was waiting for. The course had it all: reading (part of novels) that were to my taste - Proust, Musil and friends -, writing a paper amalgamating some secondary literature on all these novels concentrating on a topic by choice (women it was for me), and not unimportant a very nice professor.

Writing was all I ever wanted to do and finally, I could write: not literature of my own but about the literature of others, and I liked it. Those last two years at university were probably the best years of my life. At least, I very much felt alive.

I was in love, not only with the muse I imagined him to be but with modernist literature and writing. And then everything fell apart: the love was - as far as I know - not mutual. I told him, but the reaction was not what I expected or hoped it would be, and the dream of becoming a PhD student was shattered very fast.

I felt empty, wanted to go further and got stuck for a few years. I hated all my subsequent jobs and focused on my husband, having kids and my little family to be. They were my saviours, although far away from the life I imagined to have when I was sixteen. You have teenage dreams and then life itself comes along. 

I am 39 years old - at the end of this year turning forty - and enduring a middle crisis.

I always felt like I was born exactly a century too late. Sometimes my life feels off because I am born on the wrong date, and in the wrong place. But let’s be realistic: a hundred years ago I might not have been a kindergarten teacher (nor a female decadent or modernist writer) and I’d probably have ten children of which four died during infancy instead of the two I have at the moment.

My kids: boy and girl, fire and water, “little flame” and “of the sea”, and always their own version of Sense and Sensibility. They make life worth living and 'the words' worth writing.

​

So, this writer is a kindergarten teacher, a wife, a mother of two, a non-native speaker of English and indeed not the artist or professor of English literature she wanted to be. But she still is an Oscar Wilde and James Joyce enthusiast.

Did I get your attention? Are you curious? Please, do not hesitate to pay a visit to my Instagram page @allthingsjoyceandwilde celebrating daily the lives and works of Oscar Wilde and James Joyce. 

​

INKY EDITORS NOTE

​

It is always a particular honour to be sent a personal essay by a writer, and some

of the best personal accounts I've ever read have been by literary, non-fiction writers.

AllThingsJoyceandWilde demonstrates this with such an aching grace and authenticity that it is hard to believe English is not her native language.  We all know that language wields enormous power and this essay proves that in multiple, lyrical ways. 

​