Of course she chooses Raphael, and she’s hardly been married to him two minutes before she’s pregnant. Our heroine is feisty and determined, both madcap and wonderfully sane, stylish yet messy, and passionately loyal to Nicolas, Loulou and her boyfriends, well-born law-school Adam and crazy figure-skating champion Raphael. The detail of Noushka’s chaotic circumstances and daily life, her thoughts and her feelings, seem tedious at first, but it is worth persevering with this novel.
Will Noushka go the same way as Peaches, a tragic victim of her parent’s lifestyle choices (as the red tops would have it), or will she live and flourish, finish high school and make something of herself? Will she, can she rewrite the story that seems to have been drafted for her by others, by her mother’s abandonment of her, by her father’s exposure of her on television, by the documentary’s producer? Depending on the outcome of the ballot, the shape of the eventual programme’s narrative will either be triumph or rise-and-fall. Still they are recognized, added to which, in the run up to the 1995 referendum on Quebecois independence (the Tremblays will vote yes), a film crew is making a documentary about the family. Now Noushka and Nicolas are twenty, engrossed in each other and living with their grandfather Loulou in near squalor. They would sing and dance and the nation fell in love with these cute little ingénues. Her whole life has been lived on telly, ever since her father made her and her twin brother Nicolas partners in his early-1980s television fame.
Noushka is daughter to Montreal legend and faded folk singer Etienne Tremblay and never allowed to forget it by press and passers-by alike.
Peaches Geldof might well have identified with Noushka Tremblay.
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