Nicolas Mathieu: “More than 100,000 people ended up experiencing my love story like a soap opera.”

One doesn't decide who to love, and sometimes love is doomed to remain clandestine. The reasons are many, but they all end in the same thing: silence. Nicolas Mathieu (Épinal, France, 1978) has been through a couple of relationships of this kind. The most recent—and current—is the one he has with Charlotte Casiraghi, daughter of Caroline of Monaco, which has put him in the spotlight of social media, much to his chagrin, and about which he prefers to "remain discreet," as he himself admitted to La Vanguardia during his visit to Barcelona. But, years before this high-profile engagement, he was involved in a similar situation that drove him "totally crazy." So much so that he felt the need to break all secrecy and explain what he was going through on his Instagram account.

“I had few followers, so I experienced it as a kind of personal diary. Externalizing it helped me vent and, at the same time, allowed me to turn something very intimate into something universal, as many people wrote to me acknowledging they were going through something similar. This helped me feel better and gave me the opportunity to express a whole range of feelings, ranging from the beginning to our life together, as well as the estrangements that occurred in between. Without realizing it, I ended up reaching more than 100,000 people, who ended up experiencing my story like a soap opera.” Now, she's revisiting many of these texts and reworking them to give them a unique tone in El cielo abierto (Open Sky , AdN), recently released in bookstores.

More and more writers will be born on the networks”

Beyond love, the stories express other aspects of everyday life, such as encounters, trains, books, the horror of Sundays, waste, and appreciation for parents and children. “I wanted to save what was left on social media. I felt that if I didn't, everything would be left in limbo, and everything I wrote during that time is important to me and has shaped me, because it was when I learned that the everyday could be elevated to something greater.”

The author reflects that having shown readers their intimacy is still "a fiction," because "you can experience something firsthand, but when you decide to tell something, you carefully choose which parts you want to magnify and which ones you want to leave out. You're forced to do this with novels, and even more so with social media, since the space they allow is limited." He values ​​this as a positive, because "it allows for the intensity that, well managed and as long as it doesn't become toxic, is the basis of everything." Proof of this is that "all these texts were written in less than thirty minutes, which is the time I think best captures a feeling, especially if you're recounting an experience that just happened. I prefer that to not drawing on memories."

That his beginnings were forged on Instagram is something that "not everyone has been able to understand," he laments. "Critics seem to be bothered that someone who started there can win the Goncourt Prize, as I did in 2018 with Their Children After Them . But it's also literature, and as the years go by, we'll find even more examples of writers born online who use these platforms as a laboratory to find out what people think, or simply for fun or relief. When cinema was born, critics also said it was entertainment for the uneducated."

In any case, criticism isn't something that worries him too much, but it does bother him to think about the impossibility of ever again speaking about such deep intimacies. "I miss the anonymity and expressing my thoughts. Have I changed? I imagine so, although I don't usually read myself anymore. I've matured as a writer and as a person, but I confess that I miss that creative freedom where what I said had no repercussions other than those of creating a community."