Fresh Water for Flowers
Fresh Water for Flowers
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Valérie Perrin on Fresh Water for Flowers
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A gate closes, and Violette appearsThe second book began not with a plan but with an absence: the emptiness that followed finishing her first novel, ‘Forgotten on Sunday’. When readers wrote demanding more, she had no subject ready. Then a cemetery visit to her husband Claude’s family grave changed that.
I felt a deep sadness and melancholy after writing my first book, and then I met Violette in a cemetery. When my readers finished Forgotten on Sunday, they asked me to continue writing. I soon realised that Violette would be an important subject, and so I decided to write Fresh Water for Flowers.
The cemetery in question was in Aubervilliers, and Perrin was leaving through the gate, dogs alongside her, when the character arrived. She has never claimed full authorship of that moment.
I always say that it was Claude’s parents who whispered this idea from the beyond. [paraphrased from audio]
The formulation is not merely charming. It places Violette’s origin inside a real act of mourning, and it means the cemetery keeper of Burgundy was, from her first breath, entangled with an actual grief.
How she wrote it
Journalism first, then music, then the camera in her headBefore Perrin writes a word of fiction, she spends time doing something most novelists don’t: she interviews professionals in her protagonist’s field. For ‘Fresh Water for Flowers’, that meant learning what cemetery caretaking actually looked like day to day, from the people who do it.
I don’t know if other authors do this, but I act as though I’m a journalist before I start writing. I ask questions to people working in the profession of my protagonist. It’s so important to ask questions to find the truth about people and their day-to-day lives, and the situations that I will cover in my novels.
Perrin worked for years as a set photographer and co-screenwriter before publishing her debut novel at 48. That training didn’t stay behind when she moved to fiction.
My books are like screenplays, filled with dialogue and I often set up very visual exchanges because I come from the world of photography and screenplays. I think in terms of cinema when I write, as though I am holding my camera and filming the characters and their spirits, in the past and the present.
Sound mattered as much as image. While the cinematic framing governed structure and scene-building, specific music governed mood. One album in particular locked her into Violette’s world and stayed running for the entire draft.
When I wrote Fresh Water for Flowers, I listened to a good deal of Bach and Chopin. Especially when I was inside Violette’s lodge, or close to Sasha. And in particular, that book was written when I was listening non-stop to À Present, one of my favourite albums by the French singer Vincent Delerm.
When the manuscript was finally done and handed over, the relief took a specific form. Perrin didn’t celebrate with colleagues or champagne. The destination she chose, and then returned to the very next morning, reveals how close cinema and writing remain for her.
On the morning when I handed the finished Fresh Water for Flowers to my editor, I went to the cinema and saw Call Me by Your Name. I remember smiling throughout the film, I liked it so much. And the following day, I went back to see it again, to feel again what I had felt the day before.
The personal thread
Swimming in June to meet ViolettePerrin physically placed herself inside the novel’s geography to close the distance between herself and her protagonist. Violette, the cemetery keeper at the center of the book, has a ritual swim each August in Marseille. Perrin went to find her there, off-season and in cold water.
I went for a swim that day, just like Violette did every August in my novel. It was June. It was cold, but I still went there to meet her.
The detail is small but exact: she was not researching a location for its descriptive possibilities, she was performing the character’s action in order to feel what the character feels. That is a different kind of preparation.
What she demands of herself before writing is also what she demands of the book: it must move her before she can expect it to move anyone else. She described this as a condition, not a preference.
I myself need to be touched by what I say before giving what I have to give and to read. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
A book that repairs, a death that transformsThe novel’s reception surprised her. Doctors, nurses, and psychologists began bringing it into sessions on grief, heartbreak, and burnout. Perrin hadn’t written a self-help book, but she arrived at a single phrase that explains why it functions as one.
It’s a book that does good. It’s a book that repairs. [paraphrased from audio]
What the book argues about death is not consolation in the easy sense. Violette’s daily work, tending graves and receiving the grieving, becomes the vehicle for a specific claim Perrin wants readers to carry out with them.
Death can also transform, and as long as we dream of you, as long as we think of you, we are still alive. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s reach across countries and languages, none of which Perrin had anticipated when she began it, is something she attributes entirely to her protagonist rather than to herself. Violette arrived as a gift from a cemetery in Aubervilliers and ended up touching readers across dozens of translations.
I owe everything to this character of the cemetery keeper who touches something universal. The reader is the same everywhere for me. I feel it very strongly. [paraphrased from audio]