It’s better to know nothing about this book before reading it, to dive right in, getting immersed in its copious pages. Any defence or synopsis, any judgement on this work would be a simplification and a pointless exercise.

Marie Billetdoux really has succeeded in erecting a considerable monument: in terms of its size and scope, of course, but also for its impropriety and the almost extravagant quota of secrets, both trifling and significant, that it reveals. It’s Me Writing Again is not a novel, an essay or a collection of texts, and certainly not a book of correspondence. It is quite simply proof that, at the beginning of the Twenty First Century, it is still possible to invent a new literary genre. Here we have forty years (1968 - 2008) in a woman’s life; we meet her as a schoolgirl in the opening lines of the book and we leave her on the last page as the mother of a twenty-three year-old son and the widow of a man she loved very much. Between these two stages, we follow Marie-Raphaël: a writer who enjoys success then later fails, a filmmaker, journalist, a woman in love and a woman pursued in love, a lover and mistress but always free. Free except on one thing: the prison of her family. Because of her dramatist father who is so inclined to silence but also her endlessly talkative mother, and because of her sister as she inexorably distances herself but also her grand-parents with all their mysteries.

Every writer may have dreamt of bringing together this sort of material but here every reader, every individual ends up dreaming of it too.

This is Marie Billetdoux’s tour de force, having on the one hand kept everything she has written from the age of seventeen to fifty-seven, and at the same time having carefully kept the reply to each of her letters, mixing it in with mail from her readers, school reports, birth, marriage and death certificates, press reviews of her books, letters from solicitors, admirers and detractors, love letters, letters from her mother (some caring, others furious), and, of course, passionate letters from Paul (the father of her son) who is now dead.

This wealth of material deserved organising, putting together, working through by a writing aware of its dramatic potential, its rhythm and music, and who also wanted to make each correspondent an actual living person; to show how all of these characters evolved.

Any comparison, it is probably now clear, would be ludicrous and inappropriate. Marie Billetdoux goes to the deepest recesses of the first person singular without any circumlocution of affectation. No writer will ever have appeared so naked, or so strong.

Marie Billetdoux, writing under the name Raphaële Billetdoux, is best known for her books Prends garde à la douceur des choses (Interrallié prize, 1976), Mes nuits sont plus belles que vos jours (Renaudot prize, 1985) and Chère madame ma fille cadette (1997). In 2006 she first used the name Marie and wrote Un peu de désir, sinon je meurs then C’est fou, une fille (2007).