Hors-champ de l’amitié • La meilleure d’Emmanuelle Lambert

Can you talk about your “best friend” when you are an adult? The part of childhood contained in this expression sheds light on a link that has been forged in the banality of a shared daily life and without it being known at the outset how strong this link would be. A relationship melted into the ordinary of days could not be captured by a camera: the most important image of friendship would be missing.

And yet it is some photographs taken from family archives that will allow Emmanuelle Lambert to recount his friendship with Maïra, met in Epinay-sur-Orge when they were both six years old. For this praise of a friendship, tender and sensitive, also calls for the evocation of the territories on which it evolves: the suburbs, “on the border of the metropolis and the border of language”, and exile (Maïra’s family had fled the military dictatorship in Argentina), two components of a “paradoxical identity”.

With

Emmanuelle Lambert, writer. She is the author of a dozen texts since 2009, including Giono, furioso (Stock 2019, Prix Femina essay) and No respect (Stock, 2024)

Hosted by

Raphaëlle Leyris, journalist at the World of Books