Griffin Bay Author Event: Marie Houzelle

Tita by Marie Houzelle
Sunday, Apr. 19, 2:00 – 4:00 at Griffin Bay Books

Tita is seven, and she wonders what’s wrong with her. She has perfect parents. She revels in the Latin rituals of small-town Catholic life in the south of France in the late fifties. She puts on plays with her friends, spies on adults, challenges her teacher, and manages to read forbidden books. She should be happy. But she dreams of a life without meals, and keeps worrying about her mother’s whereabouts, spoiling her own life for no reason at all. Is she a freak?

This is Marie Houzelle’s first novel, an engaging story of a young French girl whose fierce originality threatens to make her an outcast from the only world she knows. Tita’s life seems to be defined by obstacles: the many foods that disgust her, the school that fails to challenge her, and parents who struggle to understand her. Tita is precocious and clever, but in some ways painfully inept. She is thoughtful but frail—obsessed with rules and rituals, and determined to understand the nuances. She finds a refuge—and a future—in books.

Through Houzelle’s sharp, straightforward prose (which captures Tita’s perspective), the story of how Tita grows takes center stage. She learns the alternatives to those things that have held her back or held her down. She challenges social strictures that she feels are meaningless. She battles her mother to get what she wants, and when sometimes that turns out to be the wrong decision, she acknowledges it. At the novel’s end, Tita is still a little girl, but her brilliance, potential, and unusual way of looking at the world will have won readers over.

As one enthusiastic reviewer put it: “Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages. Like Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy, the story is powered by a precocious and independent loner whose observations and reports are both charming and moving. Tita is a remarkable debut.”

About the Author
Marie Houzelle is the author of No Sex Last Noon (I Want Press). Her stories and poems have appeared in Serre-Feuilles, Pharos, Orbis, Van Gogh’s Ear, Narrative Magazine, and the collection Best Paris Stories. She lives in Ivry, just outside Paris, with her bicycle.

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