Charlie and Éric Chacour (What I Know About You) discuss Egypt in the 1970s for the Levantine community and LGBT people, the famous French-Egyptian singer Dalida, Romeo and Juliet, Éric’s use of the second person, and author and translator working together on writing that had been in place for 15 years.

General references:
Dalida’s Helwa ya Baladi

Books mentioned by name or extensively:
Éric Chacour: What I Know About You

Buy the books: UK || USA

Release details: Recorded 20th September 2024; published 10th February 2025

Where to find Éric online: Facebook || Instagram

Where to find Charlie online: Twitter || Instagram || TikTok

Discussions

02:09 Éric’s initial inspiration, Romeo and Juliet, for What I Know About You (he’d been writing the book for years)
05:18 The writing itself, including the use of the second person (Charlie has pointed out Éric’s dedication to syllables and language) and the translation
10:31 The political backdrop, the use of it, and the decades chosen
13:29 The time period in terms of the LGBT community and Tarek’s choices in that context
14:55 Entangled protons and love
16:25 Could Tarek have stayed with his family?
18:24 More on reader’s interpretations and reactions
20:53 Nesrine and Mira and their importance
26:35 The servant, Fatheya
29:16 Talking of the impossibility of another point of view and the ending
31:20 Éric tells us why he included Vivienne
33:11 More about theatrical inspirations, and then we get on to how Éric wanted to be a songwriter
37:44 Dalida
39:22 Should we blame the grandmother?
41:54 Reality and fiction in terms of Rafik’s narrative owing much to imagination and interpretation
45:41 What’s next?

Transcript

Please note that this transcript has been edited for legibility and is not a 100% accurate representation of the audio. Filler words and many false sentence starts have been removed, and words have been added in square brackets for clarity.

Charlie: Hello and welcome to episode 115 of Author’s Afterword, formally known as The Worm Hole Podcast. On this podcast I talk to an author about one – occasionally more – of their books in detail. And if you find yourself enjoying today’s episode, do share it with your friends. So, I’m Charlie Place, and today I’m joined by Éric Chacour to discuss his multiple award-winning debut, What I Know About You, which has been translated from the original French into English by Pablo Strauss. When I said multiple awards, I really meant it – the book has won a lot of them, and was shortlisted for two of French literature’s biggest. And it has been lauded by booksellers beyond compare; they all wanted to get their hands on copies of this book. Let’s get to a brief premise. Everyone said Tarek would become a doctor like his father, so he did. Between the 1960s and 1980s he grows up in his native Cairo against the backdrop of massive political events, and eventually marries his first love. And then, sometime later, he meets Ali who comes from a rundown area called Mokattam, employs him as an assistant at Ali’s mother’s behest, and later on, in a society that prefers this sort of thing not exist, he falls in love with Ali. Now there’s just one thing here – Tarek is not telling us this story; neither, really, is Éric – the book is written partly in the second person. Someone else is writing this story – who are they? And what do they know? This is a story of yearning for one’s father or, as Éric has put it himself, ‘a story of absence of a family member in another’s life’. Hi Éric!

Éric: Hi Charlie. Thank you for the invitation.

Charlie: You are welcome. It’s been an absolute joy reading your book. You took a number of years to write this book, I believe. I think I’ve… well, the subtitles on YouTube have told me fifteen years [Éric laughs]. What was your initial idea or inspiration for the story?

Éric: Well, actually, I’m not even sure how many years I took to write this book. I wasn’t able to find the first version, but yeah, something like ten or fifteen years, maybe. And the first inspiration was Romeo and Juliet; it’s an English inspiration. And since you authorise some spoilers in your podcast, I can tell that to you – there is this mechanism in Romeo and Juliet which is absolutely incredibly clever from Shakespeare, to make Juliet die and then she’s not dead but Romeo dies… well in my case he goes in exile and Juliet dies a second time. And that was exactly what I wanted to say, but in the Egypt of my parents and between two men. So that became my book.

Charlie: Well, can you talk more about this? Why was it important to create this element of Romeo and Juliet and explore it?

Éric: Well, first of all, because Romeo and Juliet is the most incredible love story ever written. The novel is structured to surprise readers. There are successive revelations, there are wrong turns, red herrings, and I wanted to play on that. And I think Romeo and Juliet, by design, has this very clever way to tell things and have some revelations. So, yeah, I think I wanted something like that. Another English inspiration is Agatha Christie, because [laughs] one day I found two researchers who were trying to understand how Agatha Christie captivated, at that point, the attention of the readers. And they found two things: the first one is that the most [time] the story was engaging, the shorter her sentences were. And the other thing is the story was told and the shorter the words were. So she was using words with one or two syllables at the end of the book, while at the beginning it was longer words. So I decided to do the same with my book with the parts. And if you notice, the two first parts, well, the first one is a longer one, and then the second one is a bit shorter, and the last one is very, very, short. So I was trying to, yeah, engage the reader and give some suspense.

Charlie: Okay. Wow. Well, I’d heard that you had some inspiration from Romeo and Juliet, but I would not have guessed Agatha Christie! However, that is interesting because when I’ve done my research, and I’ve seen you talking about syllables, and that was something I’ve noted down, I want to ask about, actually, because you’ve got Rafik’s writing, effectively, his word choices, and your own, as the author of author Rafik, if that makes sense. Yeah, it was absolutely wonderful. And yeah, you’ve spoken about syllables, and I think you’ve also said about placement of sentences before. Can you just talk about how you’ve written the book and your writing style, and just more on that?

Éric: Well, I had my plan; I had a plan from the beginning. And honestly, the structure didn’t change, really, in the course of writing it. I knew from the start that I wanted the second person narrative. So what you were saying about Rafik, who is telling the story of his father, and I wanted him to be an unnamed, ‘you’. So, yeah, it was something I wanted from the beginning. But one thing that did change was at what point in the book the narrator’s identity is revealed. I had planned for this to happen only at the very end when I was starting the book and then I realised that maybe we could just shed the right amount of light if we revealed it earlier. So, yeah, that’s something that changed a bit in the book. I’m not sure that answer was very, understandable!

Charlie: Yeah, no, it didn’t, it was fine. It made sense. It made sense.

Éric: Okay, okay, I’m sorry!

Charlie: No, that’s fine! [Both chuckle.] It’s just really lovely. I got quite excited, actually, because I do love the second person, and I was just absolutely overjoyed when I opened your book and saw it and they was a ‘you do this’. I know lots of people don’t like the second person – I love it!

Éric: But this is something quite funny, you know, because I want the reader to be trying to figure out who is the narrator. And so, yeah, the reading process is like an investigation. We were talking about Agatha Christie. I wanted each reader to come up with their own theories as to who could be the narrator. I even recall the psychoanalyst who told me, “Oh, I thought it was the…” And I’m sorry, I don’t have the English words for that, but I thought it was, “the sur moi of Tarek talking to his moi [the ‘about’ or ‘on’ Tarek, talking to his ‘me’]”. So I was like, “Oh, my God, this is really a psychoanalyst analysis of the book”! But, yeah, I like this. And someone once described What I Know About You as a poetic detective novel. And I think it’s a wonderful way to put it, because obviously it’s not a detective novel, and it’s not a poetry collection either, but I think there is something of the intention of both categories in my writing.

Charlie: Yeah, I get it, yeah, I can see where they were coming from. I mean, every single word in your book and every single sentence is there for a reason, and you can see how much thought you’ve put into it, definitely.

Éric: That was important for me. You know, I’m from Quebec in Canada, and Quebec is the French part of Canada. So we have two big traditions of writing – we have the North American one, which is really driven by the rhythm, with lots of periodicity, and the way the story is structured and all that; how to make a page turner, you know? And the French tradition, which is really focused on the way the sentences are crafted and the worlds are chosen and all that. And I think it’s a chance to be in the confluence of both. And I try to put both in my book because that’s what I want to find when I read a book – a, story well crafted but also with beautiful sentences. And for the translation Pablo made a wonderful work so…

Charlie: That’s something that you wonder when you’re reading a translation – how close is it? And the way that you had talked about it in your interviews, I could see that the English translation was really good, which was lovely.

Éric: Yeah, and I was lucky enough to read Pablo’s entire translation before it was finalised, so I was able to give him my feedback and also to appreciate his high quality. And we had many discussions about the intention behind certain passages of the text. And at the beginning I was telling you that it took me maybe ten or fifteen years to write, so sometimes he was asking me question about sentences written fifteen years before [both laugh]. So to recall the intention behind that was a bit difficult, but it was tremendously interesting to do this exercise with him.

Charlie: That’s fascinating then, yeah, so some of the sentences that you wrote have remained the same for all those years!

Éric: That was a bit of an exercise, because when you write over so many years, what does change is the way you write. You don’t write the same at the beginning of your 20s and while approaching your 40s, so of course the style was a bit different and I had to rewrite some things, but let’s say the structure of the book hasn’t changed. It has been the same from the beginning.

Charlie: Okay. this is fascinating. Okay. Right, well, I feel we’re gonna have to move on to a different topic – I could talk to you about the writing for a long time; yeah, I think the writing is in many ways my favourite part of the book, just because I found it amazing. Okay, so I’m going to go to a completely different topic on this book. The political backdrop and the choice to set the book in the decades that you did – you’ve got the ’60s, the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s – can you talk about your choices here and your use of the politics in the novel as such?

Éric: Yeah, sure. Well, first of all, I think the paradox at the heart of What I Know About You is that it’s a universal story – or at least I tried to write a universal story – but rooted in a highly specific context; the Syrian-Lebanese community in Cairo in the late 20th century. So I wanted to write something everyone could refer to, even without having the context. But of course I wanted to tell the stories of my characters and to intertwine them with the story of Egypt, so I had some fun interweaving both. But I think most people told me about the political background, and of course it’s not innocent, of course it’s on purpose that I’ve chosen this background, but above all, I think it’s a story of people, it’s a story of beating hearts. So, yeah, I enjoyed recreating the atmosphere of a certain bourgeois western Egypt, which is the one of my family, by the way, who comes from that Levantine community which is composed of Syrian-Lebanese living in Egypt from time to time, from generations, in most cases speaking French before even learning Arabic, being Christian in the minority. But once again, I think that the most important is the story of beating hearts, I’m trying to write.

Charlie: Well, yeah, I had quite an interesting time where you have… oh, gosh, I can’t remember what the exact passage was, but you talk about how Tarek and Mira had met each other during one period – I want to say it was a six day war [Éric: yeah, exactly] – and then later they come back together, yeah, when there’s I think it’s a news article or something. And I found that very interesting, yeah.

Éric: Yeah. I think it’s something interesting to play with the whole history, the great history, and once again to interweave the great history with the personal history of my characters. So I had a lot of fun doing it. And it’s funny because at first I was like, “Oh my God, who will be interested by that? I don’t want to tell too much about it.” And that’s something my editor pushed me in putting some more – she told me that, “You know what, that’s very different in your book and we are interested in knowing more about it”. So it was liberating for me. I could put some more and I was quite happy to do it.

Charlie: I think that was a very good bit of advice there from the editor, definitely. On the time period in terms of LGBT people, can you talk about this aspect? Because Tarek makes a couple of particular choices. Yeah, would like to find out more about that.

Éric: Well, Tarek and Ali are two characters that are very distant in terms of quite everything. They don’t have the same job – it’s the least we can say. They don’t have the same family background, they don’t have the same wealth, they don’t have the same religion. And if we think of it, maybe the only thing they have in common is to be two men in that Egypt at the end of the 20th century. And I wanted to show the paradox that it’s finally this one and only common point they have that condemned them even more than any of the other differences they have. So I think that’s what the story is about. And I tried also to recreate what could have been the LGBT life in Egypt at that time. Because of course there is very few documentation on it, it was all of a hidden life. But I found some and I tried to recreate a bit, imagine also, what could have been this story.

Charlie: Okay. And I would like to pick up on something specific you talk about, and I wondered if you were going to mention it more than once and you ended up going into it a few times – entangled protons. Tell us about your use of this, this concept?

Éric: Ah! [Both laugh.] With my six-year-old kid English you want me to do a quantum physics class? It will be difficult.

Charlie: Okay [chuckles].

Éric: Yeah, I like to take some theories or biblical passages or mythological parts, and try to give some aphorism based on them. And yeah, the entangled protons is a quantic physical theory that I wouldn’t be able to explain in English. But to say it in a few words, when two protons are entangled, they are linked until the rest of the time. And you can send one into space and keep another one on earth. If you move one, the older will move the same way exactly. So it was a metaphor of what could be this relationship with the two hearts separated as it appears in the story. But it was just like a blink of an eye, nothing more than that.

Charlie: Fair enough.

Éric: It’s not a quantum story.

Charlie: No, it’s very true. I did wonder if it was going to become like that, actually, I did wonder if there was gonna be a bit more. In terms of your creation and what you wanted to say with the novel and also the literal historical aspect – could Tarek have stayed with this family instead of leaving, or would that have been impossible?

Éric: I think it became impossible for him to stay. Tarek is not one of these characters who is good at asking question, he’s not good at questioning his own happiness, he’s not good in doing things if he doesn’t have to. And I think that the fact of deciding to move was almost impossible to avoid. But it’s funny because I was in a bookshop one day and, you know, there is always the Q&A part of the conversation, and then someone told me, “Oh, I think Tarek was very cowardly to abandon his family and go to Canada and leave Egypt and go to Canada, etc”. So I was about to answer, and then someone else in the audience sat up and said, “Oh, no, I don’t agree at all. I think he was very courageous toward himself”, and then there was a whole debate in the bookshop between people who had read the book and had different theories on that. I don’t have moral judgement on my characters, I try not to have some. And I think we have all experienced the fact of taking some decisions which can appear to be very courageous towards ourselves, but very cowardly at the same time, towards our family or the person close to us, or the reverse. And that’s the kind of thing I like to explore while writing.

Charlie: It’s gonna be interesting to see what you write next; I’ll be asking about that later! You’ve got a lot of engagement, then, with your readers, which is wonderful. They’re debating amongst themselves. That’s lovely to hear.

Éric: Yeah, it’s very funny. I love to do a discussion in bookshops because, yeah, they are very engaged and each one comes with his own theory. And I don’t know, each time it’s something different. One day [chuckles] I remember that girl who came in a bookshop and told me, “Oh, you know, Éric, I loved your novel!” So I was very happy. I was like, “Okay, I will have compliments for the next five minutes”. I was quite happy!

Charlie: Yeah.

Éric: So I was like, “And what did you like in my book?”
“Oh, most of all the character of Tarek.”
“Oh, really? Why?”
“Oh, because he became a doctor, but that was not his vocation.”
And I was like, [laughs] “Is it truly what you loved the most in my book?”
“Yeah, because me too, I’m a doctor and all my friends are always telling me, ‘Oh my God, it’s probably something you wanted to do since you were a young girl, and I’m like, not at all. I didn’t want to become a doctor'”.
So I was listening to her without understanding what she wanted to say exactly. And she told me, “So I had a question. Was it mandatory that everything went wrong in Tarek’s life?”
And I was like [both chuckle], “Oh my God, this is a big projection! I have to be very cautious with my answer” So I thought a bit. I was like, “No, I don’t think it was completely compulsory that everything went wrong in his life”. So she was staring at me. I was like, “Maybe it could have been very comfortable, of course the book would have been mediocre, but that could have happened, you know?” [Both laugh.]
And she was like, “Oh my God, I’m so relieved!” And she went back [laughs], she went out the bookshop and she was happy because she had the answer she was expecting. So, yeah, I love that kind of situation. And I love to talk with readers. I think it’s the best part when you’re a writer.

Charlie: Yeah, she had a very personal reaction to your book [Éric laughs]. And I hope she gets your next book. I have heard that you say about the women in the book being very important, and I’m going to ask about Mira in a minute, but I wanted to ask first about the importance of Tarek and his sister’s relationship in the novel?

Éric: Well, you know what? Nesrine, who is the sister, and Mira, are quite the same character, in fact, because these are two women very in advanced in their society, probably more intelligent, more clever, more… how could I say that in English… [editor’s note – my French isn’t good enough for that] you would say in French, than the men around them. But the society does not allow them to be that; it’s not expecting anything from them. The very first chapter is the one where Tarek’s father is asking Tarek and his sister – well, Tarek, obviously – “What car do you want when you will be a man?” And Tarek had no idea which car. It was not even a question for him. But his sister had plenty of ideas – she wanted the red card, “That one, Dad! That one”. But the father was not listening to her because he wasn’t interested in a girl’s answer, he was only interested by his son’s answer because he had a demonstration to develop for him. And, yeah, I think I wanted to show this paradox in traditional societies of women that can be, I wouldn’t say oppressed, but…

Charlie: Forgotten?

Éric: Forgotten, and also prevented from doing things because they are women, but also men that can be destroyed by the responsibility that the society gave them because they are men. And that’s a paradox because both can be destroyed by what a traditional society can expect from them. So that’s one of the aspects of the book I wanted to deep dive in.

Charlie: Okay, you said Nesrine, and we’ve got Mira. I feel that Mira gets forgotten about. She gets forgotten about by Rafik, in a way. He says mean things about her. He’s got the whole thing of “Mira, Mira, quite contrary,” and etcetera, etcetera. And of course, Tarek just completely forgets she exists. And then we’ve got the eating disorder that she’s got that we see in the background. Can you tell us more about Mira?

Éric: Maybe just one thing about the ‘Mira, Mira’ you were talking about, because that’s something which is a bit different in French and in English. In the French version of the novel, Mira has several nicknames and they recur in the novel as if they were a compound name, with a hyphen. So it was like for example, [editor’s note: can’t translate the ones É includes but two others are ‘Mira-Mauvaise-Foi, Mira-Ah-Vous-Dirai-Je-Maman’ which mean ‘Mira-bad-faith’ and ‘Mira-I’ll-tell-your-Mum’], Mira hyphen something. And Pablo, while translating the book, thought it was maybe a bit too conceptual for English minds. So we had lots of conversation about it. And we found, well, he found, this very good idea of taking ‘Mira’ and doing this gimmick a bit, inspired by nursery rhymes, of saying ‘Mira, Mira’ instead of ‘Mary, Mary’ and put a few words after that. So that’s something that I really like because it’s very special in the English version, and I’m very comfortable with it. But yeah, Mira is introduced by her nicknames, or in the case of the English version, this ‘Mira, Mira, something’. Mira is a character we don’t know much things about. And I wanted her to be like a phantom to a certain extent – I wanted to see her, but not with a front light. I wanted us to imagine her. For example, I could have put Mira on her bed calling a friend of hers and crying and telling to her friend, “Oh my God, I’m I’m so sad. My husband, he is cheating on me, etcetera, etcetera.” So the reader would have understood that he has, or she has, to be in empathy with Mira. But I prefer not to do that, I prefer to make her walk a few steps and find a frame with a picture of her and her husband and just describe… you know the gesture of the hand, turning the frame, not to see it any more. Because I think it says exactly the same. It says exactly the same than if I was presenting Mira crying and calling her friend. The only difference is that in the second way to say it, it’s the reader who does all the work of understanding, “Okay, why is she doing that jest at that moment? What does it mean exactly? What is she feeling?” And Mira is a character which is mainly described by what you can imagine from her rather than what I would say about her.

Charlie: No, that’s very, very interesting. When I heard you talking about absence and this being partly like a story of absence of a family member, I thought it was interesting that we’ve got Mira who’s kind of absent – she’s physically there, but she’s not at the same time. And everyone forgets her.

Éric: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But everyone in that story is, at the same time, present and absent. Even Tarek, I mean he’s in exile in Montreal, but he’s the most present person in the family, like a big taboo in the family, and no one dares talking about him, but each non-sentence that is non-pronounced is about him.

Charlie: That’s very true. That’s very true. Can I ask you to tell us a bit about – I believe it’s pronounced [does so] ‘Fa-tee-ya’, the servant. [&Eacute: Yeah, Fa-tay-ya.] Yeah, I thought it was fascinating. I hadn’t yet realised that she did eavesdrop. So when the grandmother’s calling everybody in for the last words before she’s going to die, I was quite shocked that she said, “Oh, Fatheya, don’t do this, don’t do that”. I was like, “My goodness!” But yeah, can you tell us about that? Because I think really she’s one of the most important people in the book and yet within the family she’s not at all.

Éric: I’m so happy you say that because it’s my favourite character, Fatheya is, yeah, and she’s like the servant; in Molière’s plays there is always a servant who knows quite everything and who gives some clues to the reader. So. Yeah, Fatheya is that kind of character for me. I think it was important for me to describe that kind of servant. In French you say ‘domestique’ and domestique is an important word because there is this notion of domesticity, of being put in a place, in a home, working every day with this family, and just go back in the evening to stay at your place, but coming back the next day. And that kind of person who is there every morning and people are asking her, “Okay, how do you do?”but without listening to the answer. And in her case, she is someone who has so many things to say to the world. She has a point of view on everything. She listens to every conversation of every member of the family because she’s always there. And no one takes care of her. And all of a sudden, in my book, she found an audience, someone who is interested by her, Rafik. And so she will delude the few elements he’s interested in, in a wider mix of consideration Rafik doesn’t care about, but she’s so happy to have an audience, finally, that she’s saying things and things and things over and over. So, yeah, I was very interested by this, talking about that fight, the one of having things to say but no one to hear you.

Charlie: That’s lovely hearing about your like of her so much. Yeah, I love that bit where she just lays back on Rafik’s bed, I think it is, just totally relaxed, like, “Yeah, I’ve got my people, I’m in my family. It’s great now.” It was really, really, cool, yeah. So was telling the story via Tarek something that you ever considered or was it always going to be from someone else? I’m thinking about, like, this is why we’ve got the short chapters in a third person, because then we can focus on things about Tarek that Rafik wouldn’t have known. Did you ever consider structuring the story differently at all, ever?

Éric: No. The structure was quite the same from the beginning. For example, I always have to know how the story will end before starting writing, and that was the case. Because the ending has to surprise the reader, but the entire story must also converge toward it. So that’s something important. And the narrative point of view is the same. I cannot start writing something with one point of view and then shift to another. So if I do it, it’s always on purpose. I don’t know if that answers the question? [Laughs.]

Charlie: Yeah, no, it does. No, I suppose I knew that you’d had an endpoint, and I was wondering exactly which part of the end point. Because of course, you’ve got Tarek’s story at the end, you’ve got Rafik’s story at the end. So, yeah, I think that’s where I was thinking of that question.

Éric: Yeah. The ending is always something difficult. I don’t like endings that leave you frustrated by unanswered questions, but too much explanation is not better. So I’m trying to balance both. But the first and the last chapters of my novel have this idea that we should always be worrying about simple questions [Charlie: yeah]. So maybe your question is not simple enough to answer [both laugh].

Charlie: That is a fair enough response, no, that is a very fair response, yeah, certainly. I wondered – you might say to me that maybe this isn’t an important thing. And, that’s why I wanted to ask you, because I couldn’t work out whether Vivienne, the character in those third person chapters, if her role in the story was important or not. Would you say it was?

Éric: So you have two types of narration in my book. You have the second person we talked about – Rafik telling the story of his father using the second person: “You were doing that. You slept in your bed, you woke up, et cetera, et cetera.” – and then you have the very quick parts in Canada, in Montreal, which are more cinematographic. You’re never in the head of the characters. Never. I won’t say he was upset at something but I will describe the eye that is closing, to take some rest or things like that. Only things that you can see from the outside. And since I was not in the head of the characters, I needed another character, which is in that case Vivienne, to make Tarek talk a bit, explain things about his life, so we can find some evidence of what his life can be in Montreal. But the truth is that we don’t know much about what is his life. You know, when you pull the plug of something and then the light [makes a shrinking sound] shuts down? It’s a bit the same with Tarek – when he’s in Montreal, his life is a bit as if we had pulled the plug. So Vivienne helps us know a bit more about what his life is and what he feels and helps him phrase some things that he wouldn’t have otherwise.

Charlie: You are saying kind of theatrical phrases there. And I know you’ve got, in a few cases, I hope I’m going to say it right – mise en scène?

Éric: Mise en sc`ne?

Charlie: Yeah. Was theatre and mise en sc&grave’ne, something that you were working with when you were constructing the book?

Éric: I’m inspired by theatre. We talked about Romeo and Juliet [Charlie: yeah]; I’m inspired by theatre. The truth is I’m not the world’s biggest reader, but I like to take inspiration from other art forms like film or music or theatre, for example. One of my inspiration was the movie, that you probably know, which is the Dead Poet Society with that scene at the end. I’m pretty sure. Have you seen the movie or…?

Charlie: I’ve heard of it and I can think of film posters, but I haven’t seen it.

Éric: Okay. Would you have, I’m pretty sure you would have told me about one scene which is very mythical in that movie. A scene that brings tears to everyone who is seeing it. At the end, when this teacher is brought by the director of the college to the students, explaining that he will be dismissed of his function and blah, blah, blah – so everyone is listening, all the students are listening in very respectful silence. And then one of them breaks the silence and does something. He sits up on his chair and everybody’s looking at him without understanding exactly what is happening and without understanding what they have to do and all that. And then someone does exactly the same. And at the end of the scene you have the two thirds of the classroom who is doing the same. And I think there is this incredible effect of everybody moved by the same feelings then someone breaking this silence, doing something, and at the end of the scene, like a crowd movement, that is, done. So when I see something like that and I’m very moved by it, I’m always wondering, well, in the story I’m writing, is there a possibility to use it or not? And in my book, for example, there is a scene at the end of the book with a song from Dalida, who is an Egyptian-French singer. And it’s directly inspired by this scene. The Dr, Tarek, comes back to the Mokattam, which is a poor neighbourhood, and everyone is looking at him trying to know if he’s therefore good or if he will go back to Canada. And when they understand this, they are all in silence with the same suffering. And then one of the characters begins to sing that song and everybody is looking at her without understanding what’s happening. And the second person sings with her and there is this final movement, crowd movement. So yeah, I think it’s important to try to find inspiration in many art forms. And that’s something I really like, I do it with songs also.

Charlie: Yeah, I’ve heard you’re a musician.

Éric: No, I’m not. I’m not [Charlie laughs]. If I were… [laughs] well actually if I were, I wouldn’t have written a novel because when I was a teenager my dream was to write lyrics for singers. For Celine Dion [Charlie laughs], of course, our biggest singer in Quebec and in the world. But the hitch was that I couldn’t play an instrument so I wasn’t able to compose music, and I decided to do the next best thing, which was to write a novel, which was of course, both at the same time, an obvious choice, but a huge challenge for me because I wanted a story that would unfold over several hundred pages and showing my characters developing in many decades and all that. So it’s obviously a playground way vaster than a song, but I think, yeah, [laughs] it all began with a song that I wasn’t able to write.

Charlie: Fair enough. You could write about a songwriter, in future, you could write a novel about a songwriter.

Éric: I would love that [both laugh]. If you know any musician, I’m interested.

Charlie: Sadly I don’t.

Éric: Next time [Charlie chuckles].

Charlie: That’s interesting. Actually, I did wonder about [checks pronunciation] Da-li-da? Is that how you’d say it? [Éric: yep.] The singer? So I’m really glad you’ve answered that.

Éric: She’s important for many reasons. She’s important first because she’s born in Egypt, so she is a kind of Egyptian singer; but at the same time she came from an Italian family. So she was that kind of person who mingled with many people coming from abroad, including the Levantine community. So there is a small link between Tarek’s family environment and the kind of Italian immigrants or Greek immigrates that you could find in Egypt at that time. And she was also important because she had a huge success in France. So for many reasons she was important, and at one time of her career, she decided to go back to Egypt and sing in Arabic. So she has done a few mythical songs. And even today, people in the streets are able to sing the song I was talking about, Helwa ya Baladi. I think most of them have completely forgotten that she was the first to sing it. I don’t think they would be able to say her name, but they know the song. And this song, Helwa ya Baladi, My Country Is Beautiful, this song is very important for the Arab world in general and for Egypt in particular.

Charlie: There’s the song on YouTube, so anyone listening, go and check it out. It’s really nice; she’s got a lovely voice. You have mentioned the grandmother. This is a different subject now. Should we ‘blame’ the grandmother for everything, do you think? In your mind, what would you say?

Éric: That’s a good one. But as I was telling you, I always keep from moral judgement on my characters.

Charlie: Sure.

Éric: There is no character in that book whose frame of values is more distant from mine than her. She is very led by tradition. Her struggle, her personal struggle, is that she lived in a very comfortable Egypt where she had a very good place in her community, and she would have loved Egypt not to change, to remain as it has always been, because it was very comfortable for her. So everything that goes against the tradition is very hurtful for her. And that’s what I wanted to say through her. But that leads to a character that doesn’t want any change and anything that goes against the tradition. And of course, having a son with a homosexual affair is something that goes against the tradition. And I was surprised because at the beginning, during the discussion in bookshops, for example, I was always asking people, “Okay, who is your favourite character?” And I had always some, telling me the mother. And I was like, “You mean Ali’s mother?” And they were, “No, no, Tarek’s mother”. And I was very surprised because obviously she’s not the one having the good role; her system of values is very far from mine. So I was like, “How come?” But, you know, at the same time, I was so happy because that means that to some extent, I managed to give her her humanity in her human-being fight. And I think that’s the most important for me, the struggles of each character, the daily ordeals that twist their stomachs in knots when they get up in the morning. So, yeah, I think sometimes we can know people well, even those who are very close to us, but without understanding their inner turmoil. And I think it’s important to have always a look to the personal fights of each people.

Charlie: That’s interesting, yeah, I can’t say the grandmother’s my favourite character, although I do like her, in a literary sense. I like what you’ve used her for, etcetera, that kind of thing. Is it fair to say that Tarek’s own story of his life would be different, and that Rafik’s owes a lot to fiction, given that he’s only got pieces of the story – basically, I suppose, is there a chance that the real story about Tarek, there’s more to it than we’ll ever know?

Éric: Of course there is. And I think the last sentences in the book are telling us this.

Charlie: Yeah.

Éric: That obviously there are some things that Rafik thought that weren’t the case, because obviously Tarek knew more things than Rafik knew. So, yeah. It’s a difficult contract with the reader, I’m trying to do [Charlie: yeah]. I’m telling a story in the second person, so with only the few elements that one of the characters, in that case Rafik, knows about his father. But at the same time, if I’m completely following this, well, I cannot make a book. I can maybe write a post-it, but not a book [Charlie laughs and say ‘true’, then É also laughs]. So I have this contract with the reader, which is a kind of… you know, there is a theory that is called in French [editor’s note: again, I haven’t good enough French to type that out]. How could I say that? I think I will forget that part of the answer [laughs as Charlie says ‘Okay, alright’] it’s too difficult. It’s a bit too difficult. But, yeah, if I’m only stuck to what Rafik knows, I cannot tell the story. And that’s the reason why I have to explain in the book why Rafik has felt that need to invent things [Charlie: yeah], to recreate the story of his father, to imagine things that he can obviously have no information about. And that’s always the trickiest part because for most of the book, you don’t know who the narrator is. So, for example, you will never have a description of a love scene, and that can be a bit disturbing. Why is the author shutting out the light at that moment of the story? But when you learn who the narrator is, you understand why he won’t tell the love story of his father in the details. But these are things that I know as an author, but the reader at that moment doesn’t know. So it’s part of the difficult part and also the one I love the most when building up the story.

Charlie: Yeah, yeah. No, I’ve been thinking, since I finished it, of how much we know and don’t know about Ali. Because, of course, then you think Rafik only has so little to go on about Ali, and maybe, yeah, with Ali, he really doesn’t know anything at all, which is fascinating in itself.

Éric: Probably. Probably not. Probably not. But I think there is a theory in the book, which is the following one: I think Tarek falls in love at least as much with Ali as a clever and handsome guy, as he falls in love with the image of himself in another situation. Because if you think of it, that’s Ali – Ali is what Tarek could have been in a different situation [Charlie: yeah] with less constraints, with more… I don’t know, more liberty, maybe. And I think you can fall in love with that, this image of you in another situation. So Ali is not described only as a character, but also as the reflection of Tarek to a certain extent.

Charlie: Yes, yeah. Tarik’s definitely got a big interest when we see him opening the clinic in Mokattam [questions her pronunciation] and that shows an interest, which of course then leads to Ali and everything like that. All right, then, so I think you might say you’re not writing yet, but have you got any ideas for another book yet?

Éric: It’s funny, because I always had two ideas very clear in my mind. [Charlie: Okay.] Two ideas with two series of characters at two different periods in time, in different places, also. And I wouldn’t be able to tell you exactly why I began with What I Know About You but now that it’s finished, I would love to dedicate my time in writing the second one. And that is quite reassuring for me, because sometimes I’m telling to myself, “Well, if at that time you weren’t able to choose between both, which, to begin with, the second one shouldn’t be so less interesting than the first one”. So it’s a bit reassuring for me. The only tragedy is that I have never written so little then since I’m a writer, I have no time to do it! The promotion of that one takes me a lot of time, and I missed the solitude of my computer and the fact of writing. So if you have something to wish for me, it is to find some more time [both chuckle] to write.

Charlie: Definitely; I hope you get the writing time without missing out on anything else that’s important. Well, we will wait to see where that goes. Éric has been absolutely lovely having you today; thank you so much for coming. Thank you for dealing with my complex questions, particularly.

Éric: [Laughs] thank you for dealing with my basic English! [Charlie joins in the laughter.]

Charlie: You’ve been great. You’ve been great.

Éric: Thank you, Charlie. It was a pleasure, really. Thanks a lot.

[Recorded later] Charlie: I do hope you enjoyed this episode; do join me next time. And, if you have a moment to spare, please do leave a rating and/or review of this podcast on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or Podcast Addict. Thank you! Author’s Afterword episode 115 was recorded on 20th September 2024 and published on 10th February 2025. Music and production by Charlie Place.

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