![]() An only child, she was shunted between a bewildering number of boarding schools. ![]() She made the first of her "escapes" when she was 18, turning up on the doorstep of her old nurse in her childhood city of Montreal, leaving her mother in New York. Gallant's life seems richer in stories than most. "I could only stop myself by saying: 'It's only a story, pull yourself together.'" She recalls how, reading one of her stories, "The End of the World", to a group of bored schoolchildren, she started to cry because she had forgotten the ending and suddenly realised one of the characters was going to die – and her eyes, just a minute before creased with laughter, fill with tears across the table. Her osteoporosis is forgotten (sitting for long periods, and even writing, are painful) as figures from her past, or characters from her fiction – both seemingly as real to her as each other – are recollected and reanimated. She is pin sharp: if you aren't careful, and push for direct answers, the stories burst in your face. Indeed, the life and work seem almost indistinguishable: she speaks in a succession of stories, as effortlessly as bubbles blown through a loop, smaller tales attached to larger ones. "I have lived in writing, like a spoonful of water in a river," she writes in the introduction to her Selected Stories. Now 87, she is a famous regular herself the only time she is unable to secure her own spot – the cosy "Picasso booth" – is when Paloma, the artist's daughter, is in town. Can you imagine – the French giving anything away free!" she says, her handsome face crumpled by a chuckle. "It was a terrible winter and I used to come here because it was warm and I didn't have any electricity in my apartment. She first came to the restaurant when she arrived from Montreal in 1950. We meet in Le Dôme, a notorious hangout for writers and artists in bohemian Montparnasse and long a favourite with Gallant, who lives what used to be for her just a nip around the corner, but is now – due to increasing frailty – a short taxi ride away. "Only personal independence matters," she once wrote, quoting Boris Pasternak, and this might well be her motto. She has travelled extensively, usually alone, across Europe. Reading too many of her stories at one time leaves the reader feeling strangely adrift, the world slightly askance. A Canadian in Paris who has devoted her life to writing, she is one of the great chroniclers of exile, her fictional landscapes inhabited by misfits and lost souls, characters far from home, literally or emotionally. "They were all in a strange land and out of context," one of the characters reflects in Green Water, Green Sky, Gallant's first (of only two) novels, written in 1959.
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