Literature
2019 Fall Grantee
Catherine Texier
Catherine Texier was born and raised in France. She has traveled extensively in South America and lived in Montreal before making her way to the US. She started to write in English when she moved to New York, after publishing her first novel, Chloé l’Atlantique, in French. Since then she has written five more novels, Love Me Tender, Panic Blood, Victorine, Young Woman With a Bunch of Lilac (published in Italy), and Russian Lessons. Her memoir Breakup was an international bestseller. Love Me Tender was a Village Voice bestseller in 1987. Victorine won Elle Magazine’s 2004 Readers’ Best Novel of the Year Prize. Her work has been translated into 10 languages.
Catherine is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. Her short fiction and essays have been widely anthologized. She was co-editor, with Joel Rose, of the literary magazine Between C and D, and she has written for the New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Newsday, Bookforum, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Marie-Claire, and Nerve.com.
The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded its first literature grant for Catherine to continue working on her new book, “After David”.
“...Texier maintains a certain cool distance, using the English language almost as an artist would paint. In her hands, it becomes a fluid medium, a means to convey color to the page”
After David is the portrait of a divorced writer in her early sixties, mother of two grown daughters, who, after numerous affairs and a long relationship, decides to try online dating. She is surprised and intrigued by the number of young men she hears from and enters into an affair with a 37 year-old jazz guitarist. French born and raised, Eve sees her affair with Jonah, like the French author Colette with her young lovers, as a delicious, sexy, if slightly scandalous romance, while he sees it as an impossible romance because of their age difference.
It is a roller-coaster ride through the no-holds barred world of online dating and the story of a lopsided love affair that doesn’t call its name. It’s about life in the aftermath of a divorce and what happens when a woman, still vibrant and youthful, feels trapped as the guardian of the family past and wants to give free rein to her sexuality. But Eve slowly realizes that if she wants to move forward in her life, she needs to leave behind the memories of her marriage, and let the affair go.
Erotic, raunchy at times, and yet tender and longing for love, the novel captures the complexities of a modern woman in her sixties, who came of age in the generation that broke all sexual boundaries.