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What Is My Name?

What is my name? asks the author and narrator, Melvil Poupaud.
We need only consider the filmography of this man who took his first steps in cinema at the age of 11 in La Ville des pirates (Raúl Ruiz) to know his name. Doillon, Ozon, Desplechin and more recently James Ivory and Zoe R. Cassavetes – the list is long.
 And yet this is not a book about film, nor an autobiography. What is my Name? is an object in itself. Like a box in which someone might indiscriminately stow the various clues to a very private trajectory. Teenager diaries, post cards, collages, photographs, talismans… In this novelistic scrapbook Melvil Poupaud has released his “personal effects” and assembled them, in a desperate attempt to give them a meaning. 
But where to find the cement that will turn these diverse memories – from childhood to manhood – into a coherent and appreciable transition through the decades, bringing together the young boy immersed in images and films, the teenager besotted with poetry, words and music, and the adult, the product of the first two, a father in search of the father and a lost soul on the banks of the Jordan who, once he is past thirty, longs for the sacrament of baptism? Because What is My Name? is an account of apprenticeships. Of love and knowledge. Of an actor who, to this day, embodies characters but cannot define his own role and his true place. The cement for these assembled traces of a life are to be found in the sheer richness of the literary process. 
In order to describe those, both living and dead, who brought him up and to define an actor’s work, Melvil Poupaud uses the novel, the fable and even an element of fantasy. During the course of this epic, we meet Chantal (his mother), Yarol (his brother), Chiara (his first love), uncle Jack and even Lacan, Rohmer and the drummer from Trust, not to mention the incomparable Serge Daney – all of them protagonists and “stimulants” in an illuminated fable. This is how What is my Name? unfolds, elegantly and full of fascination, like a quest for the Holy Grail in the guise of a quest for identity.

Born in 1973, Melvil Poupaud is an actor, director and musician. What is my Name? is his first book.