Investigation
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For over thirty years, the Association for Autobiography and Autobiographical Heritage has been collecting the notebooks of Mr. and Mrs. Average People to fuel research, tell the story of an era and rehabilitate a despised literary genre.
She always has little loose papers at hand. “I write down what comes to me, the little things of everyday life, the philosophical thoughts.” Marie-Dominique Pot, 78 years old, writes “like washing dishes”, without thinking and because she cannot do otherwise. She copies her notes into her diary which then ends up as ashes or with vegetable peelings. In 1939, Roland Louvrier drew the weather with his box of colored pencils, he loved clouds: “Sunrise: fog and dew, cumulus at midday and sunset with stratus on the horizon.” Jacqueline Chebrou, a former schoolteacher, kept a diary from the age of 13 to 93. On a sorting day: “All my life, I have been piling up documents with the improbable aim of making a work of art out of them. Ultimately, here I am at 81 years old in front of a big pile of papers, nothing more.”
We set foot in an Ali Baba’s cave. That day, the wind was inviting us to turn back and then the address didn’t fit: how could an association, whose mission is to preserve the diaries and life stories of ordinary people, be there, on the outskirts of town, in a business park? At the entrance, the sign indicates the municipal water treatment union of Ambérieu-en-Bugey, in Ain. But next to it, in fact: a discreet mailbox, marked APA, for Association for Autobiography and Autobiographical Heritage. The adventure often begins there, in an envelope. By