Why am I passionate about this?

I am a French novelist, the author of fifteen novels, many of which are memoirs, so I am considered a specialist of "autofiction" in France, of fiction written about oneself. But I also love writing about others, as you can see in my novel on David Hockney. Beauvoir, Sarraute and Ernaux were my models, Laurens and Appanah are my colleagues. Three of the books I picked would be called memoirs in the States, and the other two novels. In France, they are in the same category. All these women write beautifully about childhood and womanhood. I love their writing because it is both intimate and universal, full of emotion, but in a very sober and precise style. 


I wrote

Book cover of Life of David Hockney

What is my book about?

A biography written like a novel, Life of David Hockney offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of A Girl's Story

Catherine Cusset Why did I love this book?

In A Girl’s Story Annie Ernaux – the author of many memoirs about her parents, her lower-class background, and her sexual life – revisits the summer when she was 18 and a summer camp counselor. For the first time away from home, she was so eager for love that she ended up pursuing a man who dumped and humiliated her. Ernaux has a unique way to find lost time again. She scrutinizes the past with such a precise scalpel that it allows us to identify with the lost young girl and to share her confusion and shame. 

By Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Girl's Story as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.' In A Girl's Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and…


Book cover of The Woman Destroyed

Catherine Cusset Why did I love this book?

Abandonment and the end of love terrify me. In The Woman Destroyed, the happy diary of a fifty-year-old woman turns into a descent into hell when Beauvoir's narrator finds out that her husband is having an affair and is actually leaving her. Beauvoir wrote it in order to send a feminist message to women in the fifties, to convince them to get a job and define their identity outside their family life. I wonder, however, whether the intensity of the grief we feel in that novella wasn't experienced by Beauvoir herself the summer when her American lover, the novelist Nelson Algren, broke up their transcontinental passion of four years. 

By Beauvoir Simone De,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Woman Destroyed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First published in 1967, this book consists of three short novellas on the theme of women's vulnerability - in the first, to the process of ageing, in the second to loneliness, and, in the third, to the growing indifference of a loved one.

THE WOMAN DESTROYED is a collection of three stories, each an exquisite and passionate study of a woman trapped by circumstances, trying to rebuild her life.

In the first story, 'The Age of Discretion', a successful scholar fast approaching middle age faces a double shock - her son's abandonment of the career she has chosen for him…


Book cover of Childhood

Catherine Cusset Why did I love this book?

This book is so subtle and intelligent that it makes me smile at almost every line. Sarraute hates nothing more than clichés and the narcissistic self-indulgence of memoirs. In Childhood, the inner dialogue between the narrator and her memory allows her to avoid these pitfalls and resurrect the past with an amazing emotional accuracy. The questions asked by her critical self deepen her memory and lead to a delicate, vivid, and funny rendering of her childhood at the beginning of the twentieth century in Paris between her divorced Russian parents.

By Nathalie Sarraute, Barbara Wright (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Childhood as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As one of the leading proponents of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute is often remembered for her novels, including "The Golden Fruits", which earned her the Prix international de litterature in 1964. But her carefully crafted and evocative memoir "Childhood" may in fact be Sarraute's most accessible and emotionally open work. Written when the author was eighty-three years old, but dealing with only the first twelve years of her life, "Childhood" is constructed as a dialogue between Sarraute and her memory. Sarraute gently interrogates her interlocutor in search of her own intentions, more precise accuracy, and, indeed, the truth. Her…


Book cover of Tropic of Violence

Catherine Cusset Why did I love this book?

I was immediately engaged in the story of a nurse who follows a man to Mayotte and, unable to conceive, adopts a child whom she brings up by herself after the man abandons her. She dies abruptly, however, and the story changes completely, turning into an intense, violent novel about children in the slums. The orphan who fled after his mother's death is horribly abused by another young teenager who is a gang leader, and can free himself only by killing him in the end. I am in awe of Nathacha Appanah for her ability to capture the voice of street children. This is a poignant, powerful, and beautifully written novel about harassment, cruelty, and possession. 

By Nathacha Appanah,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Tropic of Violence as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Marie, a nurse on the island of Mayotte, adopts an abandoned baby and names him Moise, raising him as a French boy. As he grows up, Moise struggles with his status as an "outsider" and to understand why he was abandoned as a baby. When Marie dies, he is left alone, plunged into uncertainty and turmoil, ending up in the largest and most infamous slum on Mayotte, nicknamed "Gaza".

Narrated by five different characters, Tropic of Violence is an exploration of lost youth on the French island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean. Shining a powerful light on problems of…


Book cover of Girl

Catherine Cusset Why did I love this book?

Even though I never felt badly treated for growing up as a girl in a patriarchal world as Camille Laurens did, I loved her book. The first part, which starts with the sentence “It’s a girl,” recounts her childhood in a provincial French town in the sixties, where sexism still reigns. The distressing second part describes the loss of her son at birth. The third part is about her relationship with her daughter — born after the lost son — who, in spite of her mother's best efforts, grew up as a tomboy. The novel cleverly ends when the daughter, 16, tells her mom who asks whether her date is a nice boy: “It’s a girl.” This novel is also the most fascinating book about genre. 

By Camille Laurens, Adriana Hunter (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Girl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the acclaimed author of Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, a deeply personal and insightful account of being a girl, woman, and mother in a world that sees the feminine as less than.

Born in 1959 to a middle-class family, Laurence Barraqué grows up with her sister in the northern city of Rouen. Her father is a doctor, her mother a housewife. She understands from an early age, by way of language and her parents’ example, that a girl’s place in life is inferior to a boy’s: Asked for the 1964 census whether he has any children, her father promptly responds,…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of Life of David Hockney

What is my book about?

A biography written like a novel, Life of David Hockney offers an insightful overview of a painter whose art is as accessible as it is compelling. Born in 1937 in the North of England, Hockney had to fight to become an artist and moved to the States in the sixties. A figurative painter when abstract art was in fashion, he became very successful before the age of 40 but continued experimenting with new forms, including technology. Even during the AIDS epidemic years, his passion to create was never deterred by heartbreak, illness, or loss. This meticulously researched novel draws an intimate, moving portrait of the most famous British painter alive.

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By Elizabeth Randall, William Randall,

Book cover of Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

Elizabeth Randall Author Of Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

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Why am I passionate about this?

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What is my book about?

Tourists and local residents of St. Augustine will enjoy reading about the secret wonders of their ancient city that are right under their noses. Of course, that includes a few stray corpses and ghosts!

Secret St. Augustine: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure

By Elizabeth Randall, William Randall,

What is this book about?

It is no wonder the ancient city of St. Augustine is steeped in secrets.

St. Johns, the oldest continuously occupied county in America, celebrated its 450th birthday on September 4, 2015. More like a European enclave than an urban landscape, it is a place of cannon fire, street parties, historical reenactments, concerts, and more. From admiring replicas of fine art at Ripley’s Believe or Not, to hunting haunts in restaurants and museums, to eating ice cream from a recipe originated by World War II bombardiers, St. Augustine has it all from beaches, gourmet dining, festivals, and attractions.


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Interested in France, orphans, and childhood?

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