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I hoped he’d say he’d wait for me, that he’d still be here when I got back. But he said that if I really loved him I’d marry him right now. I reacted to that. He needs to graduate; he only works part-time. I didn’t say more of the truth which is that I don’t want to leave school. I want to study Sh…

She died on April 14. At her funeral, of all the passages of all the books she’d written, Lanzmann chose to read the last paragraph of Force of Circumstance:

I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the …

When I separated from my husband, I lived in the flat we’d bought together while he lived elsewhere, first with a friend and then in a place that we paid for out of our joint account. I tried to fill it with a life of my own, but I could only manage it in fits and starts. Ferrante inspired one of m…

Andrée’s assumption in The Inseparables, that books were enough for Sylvie, has the force of a lover’s complaint. Andrée is the most important person in Sylvie’s life at that point and her opinion matters. Being poised must attract as many people as it puts off, but when I’m taken with someone, the…

[...] “I was a madly gay little girl,” she writes, though what I noticed most in her description of her childhood wasn’t her happiness but her confidence. She had appalling handwriting (Sartre used to complain about it) and always “made a mess of hems,” but “as soon as I was able to think for mysel…