Once upon a time there was a girl whose name was Francoise Courier. Everybody called her Kiki. Since she was the youngest child of bourgeois parents, Kiki was wild and spoiled. She was expelled from the Louise-de-Bettignies School because she had “hanged a bust of Molière with a piece of string.” Soon after, the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur and a social queen of restitution applied to the Sorbonne. Of course! One of the first established universities in Europe was so suitable for her sophistication! Well, so far, so good, but Kiki was such an indifferent student that she soon waved La Sorbonne goodbye… And how did her parents punish her? They left her at home by the end of the summer and went sunbathing on the French Riviera…
And here she is – on the roller coaster of her seventeen and completely alone in Paris! During the day she lives off the fumes of profane life in a cafeteria and spends her night hitting the keys of her portable Remington, shrouded in a cloud of smoke of her Gauloises cigarettes. Only a few months later Kiki grabs the keys to her father’s black Buick and slams on the breaks in Saint-Germain-des-Prés in front of the publishing house Juliard. At the age of eighteen she faced her first serious dilemma: how to spend the one hundred million Francs she makes after the publishing of her first novel.
The charming little monster, as they call her, is Françoise Sagan. And the novel is Bonjour Tristesse (“Hello Sadness“). I’m telling you this story because it is an example of how an emotional state can be stronger than a hundred creative writing classes. And how some literary diamonds just don’t need polishing… Still, let’s be realists. If a little sweet literary monster was hiding in each of us, then why do all creative writing schools – from the famous Iowa University program or the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute to the newest schools in the world exist? For good or for bad, not all of us are like Kiki. But following the signs of experience, I believe we can be like her. Or even better. As I said, let’s be realists and demand the impossible. Welcome to Word Park.
