Emmanuelle Hutin de Maintenant

La grenade

The Grenade

May 5, 2021
Novel
240 pages
135 × 215 mm
19,90 €
9782234090514
978-2-2340-9051-4

“La Bleue” collection

																Emmanuelle Hutin de Maintenant, La grenade
																Emmanuelle Hutin de Maintenant, La grenade

A woman advances in life with the wish to check all the boxes. With women’s magazines and their share of injunctions under her arm, she builds herself around an unattainable ideal. Career, marriage, family, she must be everything for herself and for those she loves. However, as soon as her first child is born, her beloved son, she feels that something is wrong. Anxious, she watches for the drama to come as her ideal of a young working mother, her relationship and her morale deteriorate. Would a second child be the solution? Once again, motherhood, love stronger than anything else, but always this feeling that something is wrong: why can’t she find happiness in this life? Then came the first crisis, the astonishment of seeing her son jumping around, disarticulated in front of her. A second and third seizure confirmed the diagnosis: epilepsy had entered the life of this perfect mother. Little by little, the seizures multiplied and intensified. Until all of Solal’s energy was taken away, and with it the fragile family balance. This mother in search of perfection, will have to face up to her children, and continue to move forward, even when everything collapses under her feet.

A personal story, a woman’s journey of emancipation, a quest for self, from the explosion of her couple to the illness of her son. La grenade is femininity, greed, but also the brain that goes haywire and the time bomb that ends up exploding.

The author

Emmanuelle was born in 1979 in Paris. 38 years later, she remembers her first short story written at the age of nine and leaves a long career in the world of luxury to write. From her years at Chanel, she keeps a taste for reflections on beauty, on the construction of the self, on the role of appearances. In the end, her best guru is not Gabrielle Chanel, but her son, whose serious illness offers—imposes—a life trajectory that frees her from the injunctions of motherhood and femininity. She recounts this trajectory in her first book, La grenade, published by Stock in 2021. In parallel to writing, she is curator, artistic director and teaches yoga for charity.

May 5, 2021
Novel
240 pages
135 × 215 mm
19,90 €
9782234090514
978-2-2340-9051-4

“La Bleue” collection