Actress and playwright Charlotte Gabris releases her first novel

It’s time for lunch. Two women sit on their own on the terrace of a Parisian café. Like 30% of people, they go to lunch on their own. One, a model in her spare time, left her native Switzerland to come to the capital to do an internship in interior architecture. Single 25 years old living in a 9m², loneliness and independence terrorize her. She doesn’t expect anything in life, except for it to be more spicy. In the meantime, she’s working to please everyone. The other is not more sure of himself and trusts others even less. Despite a stable job, at the age of thirty-two, she finds herself somewhat lost in her married life. She would like to get married, but not her partner who preferred to have a child first.

These two women will then have ceaselessly throughout their lunch to observe, judge, compare, criticize and even silently mock each other. Two protagonists who talk to each other in a silent exchange where each tries to guess the other and invent her life. A female rivalry with the fear of isolation as a common denominator and a well-orchestrated narrative ping-pong game as its backdrop, with the dictates of beauty and fashion as its ball; pretenses which in fine, are manipulated by societal pressure, influenced by a lack of self-confidence and fear of the gaze of others. An abused judgment whose codes it is time to break in order to strive for a « body positive » in order to love yourself and claim your flaws.

Two women. Two lives that everything opposes… in appearance only. Because in the end, these two women look a lot more alike than they think. They are like its twin flames which merge and mistake each other. So carpe diem. To be in search of an ideal yes, but with kindness while enjoying life.

So let’s leave them on their terrace, enjoy this moment when, as Stéphan Eicher sings so well, “One is having her coffee laughing while the other barely looks at her. Nothing surprises her about human nature anymore. That’s why she would finally like if she allows it, to have lunch in peace « and to hear them order: » Waiter, a lunch in peace please!  »

« Lunch in peace », a first novel by Charlotte Gabris. In a fluid and simple style, with a lively and piquant spirit, she delivers a contemporary and caricatural satire through very realistic feminine thought backgrounds and thus opens the reflection on self-acceptance, the relationship to the other , management of loneliness and tolerance; a legitimate questioning on how to be a young woman in the 21st century and find her place, her balance and her well-being. Editions of Recherches Midi.

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Daphne VICTOR

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