Roland Barthes once compared the fruits of his literary and philosophical researches to the shiny pebbles on the beach which, as a boy, he would gather up and present proudly to his mother. Remaining devoted to his mother, living with her up to her death and surviving her by only three years, Barthes suggested that a male writer's entire motivation was bound up with the desire to please their mother. Pebbles famously soon lose their shine, of course, and one can only wonder what the old lady made of his sibylline works of literary theory.
One wonders, also, what Barthes would have made of Michel Houellebecq's relationship with his mum, or what offerings the author of Atomised would have scoured the beach for to present to his "old slut of a mother" who, as he put it in Atomised, decided the "the burden of caring for a small child" didn't suit her plans.
But one needn't wonder for much longer what Houellebecq's absentee mother makes of her enfant terrible, because she is going on record, publishing her own version of events in a memoir called L'innocente (no ambiguity there, then).
But while we are all agog to see the literary dirty laundry aired in the French press, it's worth pausing a while to wonder what a number of other writers' mothers might have made of the chance to put their own version of events on record. Larkin's mother, for example, might have taken issue with This Be the Verse, especially considering the extent to which the poet's activity dried up after her death in 1977. Beckett, who claimed his mother's womb as the cause for his life-long claustrophobia and whose works are scattered with ungracious references to mothers, tried to patch things up with her before her death in 1950, but her own thoughts on the "catastrophe" of her son's birth would surely make fascinating reading.
You might think Proust's mother, on the other hand, would have little to complain about. I'd still like to know what she made of her boy's lifelong devotion, albeit perhaps in a form of expression a little more economical than her son's.
