La Maison ZHM is a first novel and a work of autobiographical fiction written over a period stretching from 2016 to 2021. It is based on an experience that is becoming more and more common: visiting a loved one in assisted living. ZHM is the code to access the floor where the residents with Alzheimers live in the facility the narrator goes regularly.

This short book is set in an apartment, a bar and the assisted-living facility, which are separated by trains and mountains. It describes the degenerating madness and cramped circumstances of the narrator’s grandmother’s death. But it also addresses everything that gets opened up in the facility: unseen aspects of reality, unanswerable questions and a few devastating revelations. This physical and psychological journey — inevitably of initiation — through the flip side of human life is summed up in the character of the grandmother, who gradually crosses every border. It is interwoven in counterpoint to the narrator’s modern, urban life. By dint of going back and forth to the nursing home, it seems, that she too, will cross into new territory.

Marie Fabre has woven what she doesn’t want to forget into these chiseled pages. Not just another book on a trendy topic, La Maison ZHM will rattle readers, touching them profoundly, because it is about the passage of time, our humanity, and our own end.

A poetical and political text.