“I am very stressed” –Geneviève Pettersen

After attending the Quebec premiere of The goddess of fire flies at the Quebec City Film Festival, author Geneviève Pettersen will experience strong emotions on Friday evening when she goes to present the film inspired by her novel to her friends in Saguenay.

We can understand it. Several of the people in the room are the 1990s teens featured in his acclaimed 2014 novel.

“I am very stressed to show it in Saguenay. Not in a bad way, because that’s them I want to please. I’m not kidding the rest of Quebec, but for me, it’s the most important audience. I can’t wait to know what they thought about it, ”she confided on Thursday before walking the FCVQ red carpet.

Emotions are likely to be strong. She herself remembers being overwhelmed when director Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette showed her the adaptation of the story of her turbulent youth for the first time.

“It was a lot. Writing it is one thing, reading it is another, but taking it in the face is something else. I said to myself: crisse, so it’s really heavy. Of course, it’s fictionalized and it’s not quite that, but still. “

Geneviève Pettersen assures us that she never thought, when she was writing her book in secret, hoping that fifteen of her friends would read it, that her story would one day become a film that was launched at the Berlin Festival.

She refuses to create this type of expectation for herself. The queen of nothing, her next novel that she is in the process of completing and which will be a sequel to The goddess of fire flies. Or not.

“It’s not necessarily a sequel, but it’s in the same spirit. You would think it was the same character who became an adult. “

To be sure to cultivate the best possible ambivalence on this question, the author once again gave the name of Catherine to her main character. “It’s more of a fad of mine, I didn’t tell myself that I was going to write the sequel. “

We’ll see.