"Esther is transforming into a good person": Riad Sattouf publishes volume 6 of "Cahiers d'Esther", in times of covid<

The 6th volume of Cahiers d'Esther, published by Allary on June 10, recounts the year of Esther's 15th birthday. A year turned upside down by the pandemic which shook his little world, his family, his college life, but also the entire planet. There is the crisis, but also everything that makes up the life of a young schoolgirl, her loves, her friends, whom she now calls her "girls", her first party, and also her indignation.

Conducted in parallel with his project on his own childhood and youth in The Arab of the Future, Les Cahiers d'Esther tells the story of a young girl whom Riad Sattouf has followed since she was 10 years old. Adapted into an animated series, Les Cahiers d'Esther sold 900,000 copies and Esther also became Riad Sattouf's spokesperson on social networks, through drawings he publishes almost every week on Instagram and Facebook.

Riad Sattouf tells franceinfo Culture how he observes and sketches with renewed pleasure the daily life of this young girl "without stories", and how the year of her 15th birthday was upset by the health crisis.

franceinfo Culture: what's new in Esther's life?

Riad Sattouf: I would say that in this volume, Esther has gained a sense of responsibility. The pandemic has made her realize that we can only overcome major challenges through common attitudes of civility. She realized that if we all did something together, we could get through this. And that, she hadn't necessarily mentalized that it could exist. She was quite individualistic and she has become a little less so. She has matured, I would say. Like everyone else, she's getting older.

How did Esther experience the health crisis?

As her father is obsessed with diseases, there she had the life-size illustration of his paranoid theories on diseases. And she said to herself this thing that we've been talking about for a long time, in fact, it can happen. So for her, it became real.

Has this crisis given a different dimension to this series, by also becoming a testimony to this unprecedented global event?

You never know what can happen, if it is the eighth volume will tell the invasion of the extra-terrestrials who kidnap human beings to send them to work in mines on the moon. We do not know. The idea of ​​the series was also to talk about the world as it comes. And that's why I do this comic strip on a regular basis without planning pages in advance, because I want to stick as closely as possible to the passage of time.

It is also a small confinement diary, but I hope less boring than those that half of the writers in France have planned to do. I don't take the pandemic as a major subject. What interests me is the reaction of the characters to events, and I transcribe it. It's true that Esther started by taking the coronavirus lightly, because she understood that it didn't affect young people too much, well let's say that young people weren't too sick. And little by little she realized the impact on society, the change in her family's behavior, so that made her think.

She got serious, Esther?

Yes, she says it herself. She says: me, I'm nice. When we started to do the first Cahiers d'Esther, she was a very talkative young girl, a little naughty, ruthless, mean at times, full of passions, full of excessive feelings in the whole spectrum of feelings. And there, she is gradually transforming into a good person. And it's quite funny to watch it.

She has girlfriends who are really teenagers, who oppose their parents, who are fascinated by drugs or by kingpins or things like that and she herself, I think, feels the same way, but she does not not necessarily allow it completely.

Does Esther growing up remain an interesting subject?

I think everyone's life can be interesting, or at least shown in such a way that it can be funny or interesting. And precisely that was part of the challenge of Les Cahiers d'Esther, to try to take an interest in a young girl in quotation marks "without stories", in whom we would not necessarily be interested. Esther has no particular problems, she has no family problems, no physical problems, no problems at school, no economic problems. She is not very rich, nor very poor. Well, she's a bit, how can I put it… a young girl from the silent majority. Esther is therefore not someone in whom one would be interested spontaneously.

And it's still interesting, I find, with the desire to start her life, to integrate into a job market, into a study cycle... I think that when she registers on Parcoursup it's going to be incredible... J can't wait to see. All these depressed young people with Parcoursup was really horrible… Inflicting that on young people every year, it's really awful.

Do you not get tired of this long-term project?

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Absolutely not. I'm coming to the end of the series, and I feel like I started yesterday. I have the impression that it was yesterday that day when she was at my house with her parents, when she was nine years old and she was there blah blah blah blah, ah boys they do this and that to me, gna gna gna and that I thought to myself, well, I could make a comic strip with his stories!

And her, does she get tired?

No more. When she was between twelve and fourteen, she had a period when she was a little softer. I think that's when the hormones kicked in. And there, it's funny I'm trying to find the talkative girl she was when she was younger. She starts talking just as freely again, and it's kind of funny.

The character of Esther has become a star, has the real Esther taken the big head?

No really no. I change a lot of things so that she can't really be identified as she is. My goal is not for her to become a psychopath growing up, with a double of her on paper, like the girl in David Fincher's Gone Girl!

Doesn't the fact of knowing that her stories are going to be transposed into comics influence what she tells you?

No really not. We have a very light relationship, in the sense that either I call her or she texts me. She tells me a little story and from there, I can do something quite easily. We don't do a job with a sheet of paper next to me, where I question her by saying to her: so, tell me again what your girlfriend told you... No, it's not at all like what's going on. It remained very free in fact.

And now that she knows you well, she also knows what you're going to hang on to, doesn't she?

Yes, but above all often now, she tells me stories of injustice, things where she would like to witness unpleasant behavior, for example on the part of a boy, or on the part of the administration of her school at respect. She's starting to want to use this comic to get involved or denounce certain things!

Esther will soon be 18, and the last volume of "The Arab of the Future" will be out soon too, what are you going to do next?

I have a lot of ideas, projects, but I like it when the projects get people talking about them, rather than me talking about what I'm going to do. I always want to make books. Always always...

Always around the youth?

Good try ! We'll see…

Projects outside of comics?

Space exploration, bathysphere diving in the great depths… No, I like making comics, so I don't get bored. And since I'm lucky to have readers, lots of female readers, I can go on. I always have small projects like that that move forward together, on which I've been working for a long time, we'll see which will be triggered first. In the meantime, there will be a little surprise before the end of the year...

"Les Cahiers d'Esther - Stories from my 15th birthday", by Riad Sattouf (Allary Editions, 56 color pages, €16.90)