“Infertility is not a weakness, not a fragility”, explains the novelist Salomé Berlioux

Salomé Berlioux, founder and general manager of
Future paths, a social start-up that now supports 2,000 young people, is 31 years old. She signs a first moving novel Peach Skin (Ed. Stock), inspired by his own journey in medically assisted procreation (MAP) over the past four years. The novel of a couple who dreamed of being parents and who find themselves confronted with the difficulties of a medically assisted procreation (MAP) journey: the invasion of treatments, successive failures, lack of support from the medical profession and silence relatives. A novel on an intimate subject but with a universal dimension.

You have chosen the novel, to tell the story of a couple’s adventure required to embark on a course of assisted reproduction in order to realize their hopes of parenthood. Why did you choose a literary story for this story which is also yours?

I wanted to start from a very intimate story, the story of a couple facing a life test, to touch on something more universal. I wouldn’t want the book to interest only women and men who are on a MAP journey and who identify with the subject. I would like couples who find themselves facing other difficulties in life, bereavement, separation, for example, to recognize themselves in the experience of Diane and Aurélien, the protagonists of my novel. Peach Skin is not a testimony, it is a literary account, nourished by personal experience, in which we find characters who have equivalents in real life – for example, the third doctor that Diane and Aurélien meet in the last part of the novel, has a real-life equivalent, which still follows me today.

Your novel deals with the difficulty of becoming parents, which is ultimately the one that many individuals go through, why are there so few such stories in the end?

It is also this question that prompted me to write. How is it possible to feel so alone, so little supported and so much on the margins when, if we look at the statistics, there are millions of us in France living this situation? Since the publication of Peach Skin, friends, colleagues of hundreds of strangers, too, write to me, revealing to me their own sufferings on the subject. Why such a paradox? I think it’s related to fear, which is one of the reasons for the silence. When one is not concerned, these questions are undoubtedly put on the side of death and disease. What bothers me even more than the fear, which we can understand, is the somewhat shameful dimension that society projects on infertile couples. Even if new models of couples or families exist, the fact remains that we invite you to tick all the boxes and parenthood is one of them. The infertile couple dragged a somewhat shameful image. Is a man who cannot give a child to his wife really a man? By being infertile, wouldn’t he be a little helpless at the same time? Infertility is not a weakness, not a weakness. The same for women, it remains stigmatizing not to be a mother. However, the standard is more complex than it appears.

In the novel, you often put Diane and Aurélien in front of the awkwardness of those around them …

Many couples in assisted reproduction suffer from the gaze and reactions of their loved ones. Take, for example, the subject of adoption, which everyone brings up very easily. “You cannot have children, adopt”. As if it was that simple. However, adoption, like the course in assisted reproduction, is an obstacle course, which lasts for years. We do not bring you a baby in a crib on your doorstep. It is much longer than that. And then there are the “relax and you will get pregnant” commonplaces when you have to inject yourself with hormones every day, these bites make you suffer, you are in a race against time. to successfully go through all the stages, while reconciling your medical appointments with your professional life.

What then to say to couples who would be in this situation?

I think that today if we look at the issue a little, we all know at least one couple affected by this situation. We should probably say to ourselves that infertility is one of the subjects, such as illness, bereavement, that we cannot fully understand if we have not experienced them ourselves. There is always the risk of being a little close. We cannot apply our prism, our reading grid to advise a couple who are afraid of never being able to have children. Listening and being present will always be fairer than recommendations.

In your opinion, is the maternity injunction still present?

Probably less than before. On the other hand, it is not the same thing to decide not to have children and the fact that not to have children is imposed. Giving up this project is a way of rethinking your life, your projects, your hopes. In Diane’s initiatory journey, who always wanted to be a mother, the key idea is that of acceptance. Not to accept not to have children. But accept that life is and will be more complicated than you expected.

Almost all the doctors that Diane and Aurélien meet promise them to make their desire for children come true… Wouldn’t science benefit from being more modest in the face of these parents?

Indeed, among the couples for whom the assisted reproduction should work, there are 10 to 15% of the couples for whom it will never work. Not to mention those who will have to adapt again, for example, through donated oocytes or spermatozoa. This is also what I wanted to tell in Peach Skin : assisted reproduction is not always a guarantee of success, or not always as one might think. In my novel, there are three doctors. The first does not promise anything. The second is very confident in his results, before moving away from the couple of Diane and Aurélien, who finds himself on the wrong side of the statistics. The third doctor who takes care of them said to Diane: “I believe that you can be a mother, it is far too early to give up”. Three doctors, three visions of medicine and, more broadly, of humans. What I have tried to show is that we often think that what is difficult is the diagnosis. But in fact, the hardest part are the successive failures and the noose which tightens and which makes one come to think that it could never work. But it is obvious that Medically Assisted Procreation (AMP) is an incredible, fascinating science, still recent, with passionate specialists. They are doctors who, by giving children to couples who could not have them, really do miracles.

In your novel, Diane is still subjected to rather violent treatment …

I hope I have told these aspects with authenticity and humor as well. You have to when you are a woman immersed in this course. We recently talked about obstetric violence. It is true that in the course of assisted reproduction, as in medicine, there are always silences and neglect vis-à-vis women and their suffering. This is undoubtedly something a little ancestral. The first puncture that Diane saw, without general anesthesia, when she could be and finds herself undergoing pricks, awake, on the cervix, without seeing been warned, may indeed seem shocking. If a man were to undergo medical intervention on sex, he would be warned, without a doubt.

But, what is also notable is that she never gives up. She claims it moreover, she explains wanting to advance in this course, like the good student she was.

It’s another learning that paces Peach Skin : as in professional life, in which good students do not always succeed, life sometimes resists goodwill. For Diane, there is this project which resists seriously and the requirement, it is a slap in the face. But it is also an awareness that will undoubtedly be useful for the rest of his life.

Next to Diane, there is Aurélien, a male character, who also really exists.

Yes I wanted the man to have an important role in this book. Too often we tend to neglect men in the assisted reproduction process when they are also present. Often with a form of guilt, a form of incomprehension about what is happening to the woman who lives next to them. He is a committed, strong and vulnerable male character. However, for a couple, it is an experience that is difficult to manage. This is one of the things that is not said. This is the reason why I brought in a psychiatrist character in the story, so that these difficulties are mentioned differently. Even if the whole can suddenly become very expensive, if you add the cost of the treatments to these other supports.

Could your profession of social entrepreneur lead you to think about this theme, from which the State is relatively absent?

Of course, as a social entrepreneur, today I ask myself the question: how to have a systemic impact on this subject of couples facing infertility? This is what I tackled concerning young people in rural areas with Chemins d’Avenirs. Somehow I imagine the logic of Peach Skin is quite similar to my previous reflection carried out with Chemins d’Avenirs: how to do judo with a painful reality, which affects millions of people, and imagine collective responses? It went through an associative structure for the first subject, there through a novel, starting from the intimate to touch the universal. Will that then give rise to field fights, it is not impossible …