Nicole

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

In this autobiographical novel, Simone Poirier-Bures, who was born into
an Acadian family in Halifax, is concerned with the process by which the
imagination transforms memories into fiction.

In the 1950s, a young girl grows up in Halifax where her father runs a
candy business and swears in French when young boys plunder his stock.
The whole family is proudly Acadian, demonstrating their roots in a
summer festival that evokes Evangeline. They speak English, but they
also speak French, especially with relatives that live in the country.

While her sister marries a Lebanese man and falls into a traditional
role of mother and housewife, Nicole wins a scholarship to the United
States. A feminist, anti-racist, and pacifist, Nicole reflects on
adolescence, relationships, and the life of lower-middle-class women.

At one point—she is about 40 and an established writer and
teacher—Nicole returns to Halifax. At the end of her visit, she
considers the role of memory in fiction writing and comes to the
realization that the past cannot be retrieved: “That fixed, solid
whole does not exist; it is an invention.” Illustrated with old family
photographs and some Halifax landmarks, this book nevertheless takes us
into another time.