Guardian: Michel Houellebecq's mother, foul-mouthed Lucie Ceccaldi, 83, grants her first British interview

'I never left anybody. It was him that left me'

Michel Houellebecq, France's most shocking novelist, made his name with
tales of dysfunctional, estranged relationships. Now his own mother,
portrayed as a sex-obsessed hippy in one of his books, has launched a
devastating counter-attack in a new memoir. Here the foul-mouthed Lucie
Ceccaldi, 83, grants her first British interview to Angelique Chrisafis

Wednesday May 7, 2008
The Guardian

In the corner of a Sri Lankan canteen in northern Paris, sits a wrinkled,
83-year-old hippy with her hair in scarlet plaits. Lucie Ceccaldi might look
like a harmless, peace-loving old dear, but France is wondering if this
foul-mouthed, poison-tongued pensioner is the nation's worst ever celebrity
mother.

Ceccaldi's son is Michel Houellebecq, France's most successful contemporary
writer, an award-winning, ageing enfant terrible whose nihilistic,
deliberately shocking novels have seen him hailed as a genius. Philip Larkin
spoke for most writers when he said: "They *** you up, your mum and dad."
But Houellebecq's disgust for his "old *** of a mother" goes far beyond
that. When Ceccaldi abandoned him to his grandparents as a baby so she could
go travelling across Africa with her husband, the rejection shaped his whole
oeuvre. In his international bestseller Les Particules élémentaires -
translated as Atomised - he created one of modern French literature's vilest
mothers, a selfish, sex-obsessed hippy called "Ceccaldi" who leaves her
young son in an attic in his own excrement then dumps him so she can enjoy
free-love life in a bizarre cult. Elsewhere, he described the "fundamental
psychic flaw" his mother caused in him. He hasn't spoken to her for 17
years. He once told an interviewer she was dead.

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But now Ceccaldi has emerged from her beach-hut on the French Indian ocean
island of La Réunion and today publishes her own memoir answering back. She
calls her son an "evil, stupid little ***" adding that "this individual,
who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all
- above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money
and fame."

It is France's literary slanging-match of the decade. But as Ceccaldi tours
Paris slagging off her famous son, what initially enthralled the literary
world is becoming more and more painful to watch. Raging at Atomised,
Ceccaldi writes: "If he is unfortunate enough to use my name in something
again, I'll cane him round the face, that'll knock his teeth out, that's for
sure. And [his publishers] won't stop me." She talks about how she flew to
Paris in 1998 after reading the book and wanted to smash up his publishers
and then smash his face in.

Houellebecq has vowed to stay silent. But even detractors of his own hard
and bitter writing are starting to feel slightly sorry for him. Literary
theorists welcome the precious psychological insight into the biggest voice
of a generation, but Houellebecq warned two years ago that his mother was
"too egocentric to produce a significant account of anything other than
herself".

I meet Ceccaldi while she is having lunch before addressing a rock'n'roll
radio station and a prime-time TV show. At the first mention of
Houellebecq's name, she strops and rolls her charcoaled eyes, saying she's
sick of him and only wants to talk about herself. She feels she's not
getting enough attention focused solely on her and stamps her foot under the
table. "I haven't written about him, I've written about myself! No! ***! I
say no!" she thunders. She calls me a maniac obsessed with her son. "If I
wasn't Houellebecq's mother, I would have written the same book. All you can
reproach me for is not giving enough importance to my son, but that's how it
is." Then she sits back and smiles sweetly at the polite restaurant staff.
The title of her memoir, L'Innocente - The Innocent - sums up her position.

Ceccaldi was born in Algeria to French parents in 1926. She trained as a
doctor and became involved in communism and the anti-colonial struggle. She
moved to La Réunion with her French mountain-guide husband and gave birth to
Michel Thomas when she was 30. But before the pregnancy the couple had
planned to go on a road-trip round Africa. They sent the baby on a plane in
his "padded Moses basket" to be raised first by his maternal grandparents.
Then, aged five, he went to France, where his paternal grandmother brought
him up. His parents divorced and his mother stayed in La Réunion. The writer
later said he took his grandmother's maiden name, Houellebecq, in
recognition that she was the only person who had showed him any love.

"After you left your son ..." I begin asking. "***, don't you understand
anything at all? I never left anybody. My son is my son. It was more him
that left me. I had a relationship with him until he decided he had been
abandoned. I saw him every year. He was with my mother in law ... The
problem with kids brought up by people other than their parents ..." and she
trails off.

For 12 years in the 60s and 70s, she says she worked 14 hours a day, six
days a week "and not for the dough, but because I was a doctor, I was my
job. And you can't do that job in those conditions at the same time as take
care of a child."

She rolls her eyes. "Maybe I should have sent him to an English boarding
school so he could have gone horse-riding and become a gentleman and
everyone would have praised me."

After growing up in a boring French suburb, Houellebecq became a functionary
and once programmed computers for the French parliament, before quitting.
His acclaimed first book, Whatever, on the banality of life for the dull,
modern single man, was published in 1994, earning him a cult following.

Ceccaldi says she last saw her son in 1991, before he was famous, when they
had tea in a bistro on Paris's Left Bank. She says they were talking about
the Gulf war when he went off on a diatribe against Arabs just to piss her
off. He stormed out and they never spoke again. "He said it more to provoke
me than to express his personal feelings," Ceccaldi says. "He said the war
was the fault of Islam being a religion of stupid bastards. I said, 'No,
you're the stupid ***.'" Later, he described how he felt a great sense
of peace, freedom and light when he knew he would never see her again.
(Years later, he was cleared for incitement to religious hatred after making
similar comments on Islam in a magazine.)

Ceccaldi says that in 1992 she got a letter from him out of the blue, which
she quotes in the book: "Before you die, you've got a few years left to try
to make up for your bad actions: telephone around insisting to everyone that
they should support my film projects. Send me a sum of money that would pay
for me to live for three years ..."

"Ha!" she says, "He wanted money to allow him to create his oeuvre! That
made me laugh. He was 34, and me, I'd made my own living from the age of
17."

Did you reply? "No, because he had written that any letter I sent without a
cheque attached would be thrown directly in the bin."

Then, in 1998, when Houellebecq was at the height of his fame, she says she
stumbled upon an article about him winning a literary prize for Atomised.
(In the photo he was wearing "the same anorak he had been wearing for
years".) She went to a bookshop, picked up Atomised and was furious. "I
said, '***, it's not true.' He described me as a kind of whore, kept by I
don't know what American. That's slander. All my life I've toiled to earn
money for other people. I want him to apologise. If I was law-suit minded, I
would have sued him and won."

She writes in her memoir's postscript that she will only talk to him again
"the day he goes to a public square with Atomised in his hand and says: 'I
am a liar, I am an imposter, I've done nothing in my life except do bad to
the people around me, and I ask for forgiveness.'" Does she think he will
apologise? "Of course not, he's too proud. And also, he's famous because
he's a terrible victim. If he apologised to me, his sales would disappear."

She doesn't rate her son's literary talents. "What's all this stuff about an
old chemist who wonders if his secretary is having a wank?" she asks. "If it
hadn't been my son, I wouldn't read that kind of crap, I would put it down
straight away, because if there's one thing I detest in the world it's
pornography. That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I
don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of
France." In her own book, she speculates that he writes about sex because he
doesn't get enough. "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone
who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never
wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior
.... Stupid little ***. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little ***,
whether he's my son or not."

Does she believe in mother love? "Western women get on my nerves with their
mother love." She says she can't stand the western mothers who crow about
how amazing their kid is, preferring the "mother love of African women who
carry a child behind their back" and raise it among the wider tribe.

Do you love your son? "Yes, of course I love my son. If he dropped dead, I'd
be profoundly hurt, definitively, but I wouldn't complain in newspapers and
write a book about it."

On her son's relationships with women she says: "Above all he loves money,
and women have always kept him - first, me, and then his good wives. The
second one I never met, and I don't know the others who came after her."

I mention that he lives in Ireland. "Does he? If he was less of a stupid
***, I'd go and see him."

Ceccaldi's swearing and her raging prose is so racy and absurd that it
actually comes across as pure Houellebecq himself. In the book, she
complains about the quality of his baby poo: "Instead of a little egg yolk
that all attentive mothers tenderly wait for, he could only manage to emit,
after screaming, a nanny goat's dropping."

She won't say why she wrote a memoir about her life - "I just felt like it."
But it is painfully clear as she takes to more and more airwaves that the
whole exhausting public enterprise is her way of trying to reach out to him,
to nudge him into some kind of contact. Yet she insists she doesn't want a
reaction from her son.

But then I share a taxi with her and her publicist. She asks hopefully, and
slightly desperately: "Do you think he knows about my literary adventure?"
The publicist says very gently that he probably does know, but his
publishers have said he has no intention of commenting. I lean over and ask
her if she's sent him the book. "How can I? I don't know his address," she
harrumphs. Does she want him to get in touch? "Not at all. My primary
interest at the moment is my painful hip," she says and stares silently out
of the window.

'Hatred is instinctive' - When mothers and sons become enemies

The emotions laid bare in this public spat between Michel Houellebecq and
his mother are surprisingly common, if somewhat unfashionably Freudian.
"Much is made of the Oedipus complex, and the triadic relationship between
mother, father and son," says Dr Avi Shmueli, a psychoanalyst with the Anna
Freud Centre in London. "But it is more accurate to say that each of us is
born with an immature sexual identity and aggressive impulses, and these are
played out with the primary care giver, usually the mother."

A boy may explore his sexuality with his mother in his early years,
discovering his own body and hers, as well as the differences between them.
But eventually he has to come to terms with the fact that her body isn't
exclusively his, and that he's in competition with others for her attention.
"Usually this competition is with the father," says psychotherapist Brett
Kahr. In some cases the mother bonds with her son to the exclusion of his
father, a situation that can create rivalry and sexual jealousy between
father and son as well as an inability to form sexual relationships later in
life, but in Houellebecq's case, "to be a little boy, and to know that your
mother has gone off to be a sexual libertarian, is to feel constantly
replaced by each new sexual arrival, constantly pushed down the pecking
order".

This sense of displacement, combined with the abandonment of being left to
be cared for by others, can have deep-seated psychological effects. "The
adult son may feel rage, hatred and even sexual undesirability," says Kahr.
"He senses he is somehow not of sufficient interest to his mother, and
rejects her lifestyle and her choices."

For Ceccaldi, the emotional fallout will be equally complex. "Some of us
find it incredibly hard to be parents, but live with a deep regret for
having left our child," says Kahr. This can turn to resentment and even
anger towards the child.

"Hatred is a very instinctive emotion," says Shmueli. "As every mother
knows, a screaming baby can drive you mad, and at times you want to murder
it. That doesn't mean you'll actually do it, or that there aren't other
aspects of you that love it, but in that moment there's a need for
self-preservation. A mother's occasional hatred for her child preserves her
sense of self and the choices she has made."

Houellebecq's anger may also be a form of self-preservation. "But it
maintains a relationship as well," says Shmueli. "It makes him feel closer
to her. Hatred is easier to deal with than that more profound sense of loss
that comes with bereavement, for example. Hating someone does not imply that
you'll never have a positive relationship with them. What it suggests is
that this is a passionate relationship with extremes of emotion, both
negative and positive, and there is work to be done."

Charlotte Northedge

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