Morgane Ortin, «The Secret» of clichés9 reading minutes

After seducing millions of readers and Instagrammers around the world with Lonely loves, Morgane Ortin is back with a different project: a book that presents itself as an investigation and collection of testimonies about secret, buried wounds. It's a far cry from my usual reading, but the success she's enjoyed for many years now has made me extremely curious. Whether curiosity is a bad habit remains to be seen...

Although I have my own favorite literary genres, I've always enjoyed venturing outside my own paper boundaries and discovering books and authors that are sometimes the complete opposite of my tastes. Nothing, for example, predestined me to be won over by fantasy young adult. And yet, I enjoyed the saga of The Mirror-Pass. Nor was there any indication that Nabilla's book would be on my bookshelf, next to Musset's...

So my curiosity prompted me to take an interest in the book by Instagram darling Morgane Ortin. Her indisputable and unanimous success with Lonely loves already intrigued me, but the project's marketed and mercantile approach made me cringe, so I passed on it. However, her new book piqued my interest once again, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to try and understand the popular success she unleashes: if she has such a readership, it's for a reason! I imagined myself as the Mike Horn of literature when I opened The Secret - I'd rather become Marie-Antoinette on her way to the scaffold.

A simple question, thousands of answers

The frame of the Secret is simple: in April 2020, Morgane Ortin is on the train back to Paris and terribly bored. So, while strolling on Instagram, she has the innocent idea of making a request to her followers: «Confide me a secret». The proposal is followed by an avalanche of messages and confessions. Morgane Ortin then set off to meet a hundred or so subscribers and talk to them at greater length, to unravel the inner workings of their secret. All the while, she links the resulting questions to her personal history and her own dark areas. And so this book was born!

After happily helping herself to the love lives of her subscribers, Morgane Ortin decided there was no need to look any further for her latest project: subscribers, or the secret of a recipe that pays off. So, once again, she has chosen to briefly analyze and expose the intimacy of dozens of strangers in a new book.

This is ethically questionable, but why not? The truth is, a subject doesn't have to be wildly original to give shape to a singular, resonant work. That's where Morgane Ortin's intention lies: to make this book a liberation of speech and an introspection of the unspoken. The subtitle The sound of silence attests to this. But there's often a world of difference between desires and results. And here, such a world that a health gauge should probably be introduced.

A catch-all shape that drifts apart

The first thing that struck me throughout my reading was the form of the text. What type of text are we dealing with? A testimonial? A survey? A portrait gallery? A collection of interviews? Morgane Ortin mixes these different forms, but fails to ask herself how she can give an account of the raw material she has accumulated.

She begins by explaining the purpose of her approach, then tells us about the interviews, punctuating this with reflective pauses where she draws parallels between the various accounts and relates them to her own. By simply narrating events as they happen, without choosing any particular angle of treatment or analysis, or following any precise methodology, Morgane Ortin gives us a story that goes off in all directions, without really forming any overall coherence. One story follows another, sometimes developed at length, sometimes summarized in three sentences, then the narrative returns to an episode that has already been introduced.

What's more, we leap without transition from a sentence like «I have a foot fetish» straight to another like «I have a brother, but we were placed in two different orphanages», to «I've been having an affair for two years with my brother-in-law»; at any moment we expect to see Evelyne Thomas land in this on-set atmosphere. It's my choice.

Defects, act 2, scene 3

If the reader's curiosity is piqued at the beginning, the more we read, the more we realize that this book could (should?) have been a sequel to threads of Twitter, as the correlations between the different stories are too often drawn out of nowhere and contribute to a somewhat repetitive and cumbersome whole.

The lack of naturalness in the development of the narrative can also be explained by the narcissistic shadow of the author that hangs over every passage. Morgane Ortin can't help but constantly break into other people's stories in order to weave analogies with her own life, in a clumsy and ostentatious manner, asserting on page 33, for example: «Then I think of my personal case.»

This is all very regrettable, as the initial idea could have been interesting, but the book feels too rushed and not thought through enough as a whole, with a flagrant lack of rigor.

Lesson number one: link shots with Morgane Ortin

But the one element that really made me jump was the writing. The various negative points that punctuate the story so far could have been erased, or at least blurred, by a style that lends power to these testimonies, making them eternal. Yes, it could have. But it would have required something other than a narration bordering on personal development, with a lot of emphasis, plodded with adverbs and stylistic effects that ring false. If there's one thing Morgane Ortin excels at, it's the art of stringing together clichés and empty phrases at a breathtaking pace.

For example, on page 10: «I hate this annoying habit we've acquired of asking ourselves if we're all right, without really listening to the answer.» If Morgane Ortin had lived in the days of the Roman Empire, she'd be «Poncif Pilate». Add to this an annoying habit of dropping banal sentences and thinking them sibylline truths, and you get writing that's bloated beyond belief: «The further I get into the investigation, the more I realize that the secret exists only in relation to those to whom it is concealed.» (p. 43) It's beautiful, like Jean-Claude Van Damme.

The analysis could have stopped there, so as not to unnecessarily burden the book. It's often said not to shoot the ambulance, but as Morgane Ortin is a literary Trojan horse, this invites us to unmask the imposture. Let's turn now to the images. Whether metaphors («Giving birth to words becomes my job. Thanks to Lonely loves, I become the midwife of love stories« p. 11) or the comparisons (»Like an archaeologist, I will dust off the layers of intimacy with patience and gentleness to reveal the unspeakable.» p. 21), everything is absolutely lunar and delirious, we don't understand what it's all about or where it comes from.

Unfortunately, grammar suffers from the same neglect, with a favorite victim: the comma. If Louis-Ferdinand Céline prided himself on having reinvented the use of suspension points, Morgane Ortin can boast a similar feat when it comes to the comma, albeit with diametrically opposed success. The author of Secret throws commas onto the page, like a kebab chef tossing mozzarella onto tacos: totally at random, following the pleasure of the gesture.

Vigipirate plan activated for writing

I honestly don't understand how so many people can call her writing poetic when it all sounds false and fake. The only parallel one could draw between Morgane Ortin's poetry and language is that she's the new Rimbaud: one dealt in firearms, the other guns literature.

Apart from pure curiosity, one of my preambular ambitions was to discover the reasons behind Morgane Ortin's success, and why not let myself be won over by it too. But rather than intriguing me, this book - as you'll soon realize - deeply irritated me with its sloppy, wordy style. I had the sensation of reading a rough draft, the first draft of something that needed to be reworked. If the reader loses himself in the blurred, clumsy form of the subject matter, he's quickly caught up in the flow of writing clichés. What starts out as a minor annoyance soon turns into total exasperation. So much so that you end up skimming the book and reading it diagonally.

And that's the worst thing you can do to a book: read it without actually reading it. The reading itself has become anecdotal. I didn't write this review immediately after finishing the book, because I tried to let my irritation subside so as to be as objective and factual as possible and not fall into gratuitous attack. But I have to admit that stirring up my reading impressions has rekindled an intense irritation in me.

In the end, The Secret is a mixture halfway between an episode of telenovela and a photo novel The two of us, The whole thing is seasoned with ease, artifice and pretense. All this to say that I enjoyed my PCR test more, because contrary to what the book says, at least the cotton bud went all the way to the brain.

Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com

Photo credit: © Quentin Perissinotto for Le Regard Libre

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Morgane Ortin
The Secret. The sound of silence
Albin Michel
2021
240 pages

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