Marion Fayolle: "We are not born virgins, we are a branch of our ancestors."

BarcelonaFrench illustrator Marion Fayolle (Ardèche, 1988) spent a good part of her life surrounded by animals on a farm run by her grandparents. "These themes," explains Fayolle, who with The tenderness of stones (Nórdica, 2016) has made a name for herself as one of the French comic book authors of the moment, and last year she exhibited at the Pompidou Centre. The artist has a unique imagination that she has explored in titles such as The Naughty Ones (Nordic, 2015) and The little ones (Nórdica, 2021), in which she plays with bodies and draws children tied to their parents, babies floating inside a breast, and lettuces flourishing in women's pelvises. Unable to draw about her childhood, the cartoonist decided to make her way into the novel. Of the same wood (Nórdica, 2025), Fayolle switches drawings for words to talk about how childhood and family legacies define us.

"My writing begins as a sketch, a visual idea. The text revolves around that image, questions it, and tells its story," Fayolle notes. The novel is made up of short chapters that function like small flashes of a landscape. Fayolle explains the daily life of a girl surrounded by siblings and cousins and, through her work, dissects the role of family members in an ecosystem in which each person has their own role. "The family is a place of transmission, reproduction, and intimacy," says the author. One of the ideas that runs through the book is that children are miniature copies of their parents and that, unwittingly, they end up imitating their gestures, behaviors, and way of seeing the world. "I question the innate and acquired parts, the power we have to invent a life different from that of our parents. As in my drawings, the characters are porous, they infect each other and do not have names or very defined limits. They are unique, but they often overflow from themselves. In the same vein, we are not born virgins;

The values of peasant grandparents

When it came time to choose a career path, Fayolle moved away from what she had at home. Instead of staying on the farm, she chose to draw and move to the big city. In the book, she reflects on that choice as an alternative, not a break. "I didn't distance myself from my family out of rejection, but because I felt called to other things. I continue to bring that place to life with words. It's, rather, a metamorphosis," says Fayolle. In a way, childhood is a recurring theme in her work, because it continues to nourish the landscape that saw her grow up. "I often seek to invoke and revive it, and the values of my peasant grandparents still serve as my foundation," she emphasizes.

Animals are the novel's other main protagonists, which are described tenderly but without overlooking their savagery and cruelty. The constant contact between their bodies and those of people turns them all into children who share space and life. "The novel is not a purely autobiographical story, but a tool for summoning images, superimposing identities, looking at a family through transparency, and playing with analogies," says Fayolle. "I wrote it based on this connection with the landscape and with cows that I felt during my childhood."".