Biography

Nathalie Aumont was born in 1966. She lives in Bordeaux where she is a history teacher.

“The death of Frederic was a tsunami. Like a reverse birth. When he disappeared, our family had to be rebuilt around the vacuum that he left. During dinner, it was necessary to remove the dead place, to eat opposite or beside the unoccupied chair, to undergo long silences, to accept the wobbly conversations…. Each thought, each gesture was to be relearned. As these teenagers who grow so quickly that they are awkward to live in their body, and who, because of this shift between their body and the perception that they have, knock themselves everywhere. We knocked ourselves unceasingly in the space narrowed by the absence.”

“After this story by Nathalie Aumont, one will not have any more use of this sad expression - to mourn we must use: to advance towards the consolation. A family finds itself decimated after the car accident that touches the son, Frederic. When she learns the news, his sister Nathalie understands that lightness was gone from there. Follow pages, which, in spite of the pain that death suggests, are luminous - there is not other word.”

(Mohammed Aissaoui, Le Figaro Littéraire, September 13rd, 2013)