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This is an interesting personal question, and I probably won’t be able to avoid generalizations or perhaps some form of sentimentalism.
I was born of Portuguese parents under the dictatorial regime of Salazar in Portugal. My parents emigrated to Paris, France, when I was only three years old. Upon arrival, I developed a severe respiratory reaction that, according to the doctors, could have been fatal. I understand this today as a psychosomatic alert, an intuitive refusal of the Paris environment. Nevertheless, my parents stayed, and I lived in Paris until 2012, with a nearly 2-year parenthesis where I lived in New York, around 1995, and another 2-3 years parenthesis in Edinburgh more recently, where I worked on my PhD.
In New York, while working for the French consulate, I wrote my first novel, Joie (Joy), published in Paris in 1998, which was the expression of a longing — indeed, I never felt joyful in Paris, but rather nature-deprived, lonely and distressed: beyond the pollution and the reign of bureaucracy and stone or concrete, there is in Paris a culture of méchanceté, of intolerance, diffuse aggression and spite that I never understood. Retrospectively, I did not experience Parisian people as healthy. However, because I was an immigrant, I believed for many years that the problem was mine, and that I was incapable to adapt to an imaginary superior social order that I could not understand nor deserve. In order to survive and still experience beauty, I dived into French or international culture from previous centuries. Writing poetry in French language when I was a teenager and later books of fiction and philosophy was a refuge.
In 2012, I had my first child with a Swedish person working in Paris and because I did not want my daughter to grow in Paris and be confronted with the negativity I had experienced, we moved to Sweden before the birth. I still live in Sweden today, and I am very grateful for it. The first time I visited Sweden, in the summer of 1994, I already had a revelation, a feeling of …
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