Very few people know this, but the song Gigi sung by Dalida was inspired by a story about my mother who, in the seventies, when she had separated from my father, lived from odd jobs in the south of France, in Cannes, the city of poodles and scrunchies.
It was a Monday in February. I remember because it was cold. A cold that no longer exists, a polar cold. It was snowing heavily. Paris was paralysed. At the time, I was working for a major shoe brand created by a man who has now disappeared. Not in a magic trick, no. He was well and truly dead, well buried, well decomposed. Far, far away.
Somewhere after graduation and between a few extinguished university studies (which is the opposite of brilliant), I looked in the mirror and said to myself (apart from the fact that I thought I looked pretty good): "Well then, girl, don't you think you'd be better off somewhere else than here? Tell the truth, and don't hide from it".
I grew up in the Sixth arrondissement. Before it became a showcase for luxury brands, it was a good neighborhood. I still love it and love walking around it, reminiscing about the good times.
When I was entering adolescence, in search of a self I was still chasing, a film came out called The Colour of Money, which was a sequel to a nineteen-sixty film, The Hustler, already starring Paul Newman and also about sticks, balls and, above all, billiards.
A fervent admirer of the Cannes Film Festival, to which she is invited every year but never attends due to lack of time, being too busy getting your little shoes ready, Patricia is always in a state of trance when the most beautiful event in the world finally arrives.
In the course of her life, Patricia has had the opportunity to travel and experience a wide variety of places. From the desert of Tatacoa, to the great plains of Cergy-Pontoise, she has had the privilege of treading on territories that she has been able to transcribe in her passionate creations.
The day I left home, because things were really heating up with my boyfriend, my husband, I set off in search of myself. I left the little one with him, and headed for California with one idea in mind: to find the man I'd fallen madly in love with, the man who'd introduced me to body fever, curtain climbing and seventh heaven.
My great love affair with the Western. Horses, buffalo, cowboys, Indians, the Great Plains, stagecoaches, deserts, campfires, harmonicas, forts, Apaches, peace pipes, treachery, Death Valley, the Grand Canyon - the whole mythology of the American West has always fascinated me.
I'm sure you're dreaming of me telling you the story of the Higgins.
Last September, I woke up in the middle of the night, flooded, as if the giant aquarium in my bedroom, home to a family of piranhas, had broken and spilled onto my bed. However, I soon realized that I was in the middle of a wet dream.