This is not a book about my father. It would rather be a book about how long it took me to talk about my father. »
Lots of time. Perhaps a whole life to finally approach Sam Rykiel, the man who gives his name to his wife Sonia, to his children, including Nathalie, and to a nascent, modern, feminine brand, which nobody knows what it owes to the male part of the Rykiel couple.
A father, divorced and still very much in love, one could say abandoned to himself, who died at the age of 48 of a cerebral haemorrhage, a father obsessed by a blind son whom he wants to educate in his own learned and authoritarian self-taught way, a father feared by a savage daughter who is crying out for affection. Why so much time? So many detours on the side of Sonia the flamboyant? Wasn’t there anything to say about Rykiel coming from the depths of Poland, unloved, over-loved, unloving?
This book is written in the name of the father’s name. To tell where this name comes from, Rykiel, to give it back to him, to tell also the wounds of a missed father… It is an investigation by subtle touches, by surprises. The stages of the discovery of a stranger, of a destiny thrown into the shadows, of a man who suddenly poses in the foreground, and this is the most beautiful, the most surprising book by Nathalie Rykiel: Du côté de chez Sam.
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