“To be disappointed/I was able/the casting/for that”, writes Mylène Mackay in My heart hung on your cardboard walls, the story of a woman who wishes to no longer always play the same roles, not to the great or on the small screen, but within the four walls of the bedrooms of narcissistic men to whom she offers her heart and who give it back to her butchered.

Daughter of a poet and horticulturist, Yves Gagnon, the 36-year-old actress (Nelly, Sam, Avant le crash) has known since childhood that poetry belongs to everyone. But it was his meeting with the writer and editor Marilyse Hamelin, before his participation in the collective 15 brief essays on love, which gave him the courage to take action, despite what this act had “ intimidating and [de] vulnerable”.

There is a great deal of intimacy in this story in verse of the excitements and disillusionments of an incurable romantic, who gradually realizes that the dizziness of the drunken sexes is not worth the suffering of tomorrow. who are disillusioned. “Delicacy is so rare that it’s poetry,” writes the woman who also sees in these fragments, enhanced by Geneviève Boivin-Roussy’s drawings of dismembered bodies, “something committed, political.”

“It’s the story of a woman who finds her light and her voice again, after having lost it for too long. As my editor says, it’s a quest for tenderness towards oneself”, underlines the author, who confides with a shy laugh that she is today cured of this type of love that hurts and of her attraction to mysterious hunks, but deficient. “I built myself a different house. »

In mourning since the closure of the publishing house L’Écrou, which left its mark on the landscape of Quebec literature with its poetry which prefers striking formulas to convolutions, Mylène Mackay aspires to write without inhibition. Like the authors she admires, including the one she played in Anne Émond’s feature film, Nelly Arcan.

“Women like Nelly, like Marjolaine Beauchamp or Véronique Grenier, say things without censorship,” she observes. You have access to a flow of truth. They give me the strength, when I sit down to write, to refuse compromise. »