“Father, excuse my longwindedness”
Since Johnny Hallyday’s funeral at La Madeleine, with great effort, Denise—a woman from a mining village in Pas de Calais—writes some 30 letters to the priest who officiated during the ceremony. Through a difficult setting down of words, unfinished sentences, with the help of “Johnny’s words,” she ventures to write about her daily life. Her husband died a few months later, and her ardour redoubled. In this double widowhood, we can recognize a genuine reflexive exercise “on oneself” where the border between “the known and the raw” is constantly shifting. Life maxims clipped from newspapers allow her to plant “thoughts” in her daily habits as they are combined in very banal fashion with religious notations. There is a succession of affect and emotion, shame and pride. Our attention to this correspondence enables us to carry out a sociology of the forms of popular reflexivity that arise in these discreet moments, these intimate behaviours that circulate without warning.