Writing about the Loss of a Child: From Emotion to Action in the Work of Camille Laurens

Abstract

Since its publication in 1995, the short novel Philippe by Camille Laurens has represented a unique work in the history of contemporary French literature, as it brings to the forefront for the very first time the death of a baby, a taboo subject that had been almost entirely silenced both socially and literarily. By narrating her own tragic experience, Laurens seeks at once to clarify for herself the circumstances that led to the child’s death, to draw attention to negligence and irresponsibility in maternity wards of the 1990s, and to offer a possibility of comfort, solidarity, and recognition to all readers who have faced a similar loss. In this way, personal testimony becomes not only a literary act of resistance but also a space of collective identification.
Philippe also marks a turning point in Laurens’s creative trajectory: after her first novels dominated by fiction, she turns to autofiction, a genre that would characterize her later work. In our paper we show how this taboo motif further develops in her oeuvre: in Dans ces bras-là (2000) it appears as a persistent shadow in the background of love stories, in Cet absent-là (2004) it becomes a theme tied to the question of memory, while in Fille (2020) it takes on a new form: the experience of loss is fictionalized, embedded within a broader narrative of female lineage, and transformed into an archetypal figure of absence. 
Through the analysis of these texts, we demonstrate that Laurens shapes a specific writing of absence, in which personal loss becomes a universal experience – both individual and collective, intimate and archetypal, her prose unites emotion and action, converting autobiographical testimony into a shared cultural memory. Words become a means of shaping, recording, and transmitting trauma, but also of extracting ethical meaning from it. In this way, Laurens’s work confirms not only the cathartic and therapeutic function of literature but also its ethical power, its ability to transform pain into meaning, to inscribe trauma into language, and to turn it into collective memory and an act of resistance against oblivion.