True Self Portrait

2008-06-26T17:40:00.004+01:00

Born English, from Russian origin, I am French more by education than from ancestry. I grew up (in all senses of the word) in France, in a family of women. I attended school at “L’école de la Liberté” (school of Liberty) you can’t invent this, public school, secular and republican, in a provincial and conservative capital.
Loaded with a few degrees (Law, English and Science of Education), l spent my lost moments at some academic functions, after having tried and practised - not without failures - various occupations.
I have since long understood that writing is telling stories, not from the memories and even less from memories of dreams, but from dreams of memories.
Writing is therefore weaving dreams with memories. So, if it’s necessary to dream to be able to write, memories are also needed. And to achieve this, one must live. So I lived.
For years, a lifetime. Loves, children, departures, heavy and small wounds, big and small joys, friends, books, days and nights. And for years, I have not been able to accumulate nothing but beginnings, drafts, stillborn incipits, unfinished collections, impossible texts.
I also read. One never reads enough.
Continuing the family’s wandering, I speak, read and write five languages fluently, which, with the more or less elementary control of a half-dozen other idioms, facilitates travel.
Now I share my time between Brittany and Portugal where I finally devotes most of my inactivity, preferably under the sun, to my favourites addictions that are in any indistinct order, love, sea and writing, which are probably not equipotent figures, but that seem to me, since the age of man, the only serious things in the world.

Christophe Sims, writer

True Self Portrait