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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Camille Laurens

Camille_Laurens 2016 (Transfuge, Vimeo_151843207 CC BY-SA 3.0).jpg
An interview with Camille Laurens on the publication of 'Celle que vous croyez' (Transfuge, via Vimeo/151843207 CC BY-SA 3.0)

Camille Laurens was born Laurence Ruel in Dijon on 6 November 1957. Having obtained her Agrégation de Lettres, she taught in Rouen and, in 1984, left for Morocco where she would live for the next twelve years. She continued teaching in Casablanca and Marrakech whilst running a ciné-club and appearing in several plays. Together with her then-husband Yves Mézières, she started writing a roman policier which was not published. Laurens continued the literary adventure on her own and, in 1991, published Index with POL. Her debut novel is part of a tetralogy in which the chapters are ordered alphabetically, in the guise of a dictionary. This novel was followed by Romance (1992), Les Travaux d’Hercule (1994) and L’Avenir (1998). Laurens planned on a kaleidoscopic project and paid close attention to the minimal unit of the novel, the letter, and to the importance of the dictionary: ‘Mon projet était que ce soit une espèce de fresque. J'étais très inspirée par Borges, l'importance du dictionnaire, de l'alpha et de l'omega, c'était ça qui me dirigeait.’

In 1994, Laurens returned to France to give birth to her son. In a tragic turn of events, the baby died two hours after the birth. This profound loss marked a turning point in her writing, for a mere year later she published her first non-fictional book, a brief memoir entitled Philippe (1995) which details the event of his death. Laurens notes the impossibility of continuing to write pure fiction: ‘Après ce récit où j'avais touché le réel, l'intime, il me devenait difficile de revenir à de la pure fiction. Je pense que la fonction de la littérature est de donner de soi.’ Laurens thus turned to autofiction, a label which she however dismisses, preferring her own term écriture de soi. Having relinquished the purely fictional dimension of writing, her next novels Dans ces bras-là (2000) and L’Amour, roman (2003) intricately intermingle fiction and reality.

Nonetheless, her mode of writing was not without its arduous detractors. Her writing was brought to scrutiny in a court of law in 2003 when her husband Yves Mézières accused her of ‘atteinte à la vie privée’ for having used his and their daughter’s name in L’Amour, roman. In 2007, it was Laurens’s turn to attack another author: following the publication of Marie Darrieussecq’s Tom est mort (2007), a novel the subject of which is the loss of a son as related by his mother, she felt the author was exploiting the death of a child as a ‘theme’. In a poignant essay, ‘Le syndrome du coucou’, Laurens accuses Darrieussecq of ‘usurpation d’identité’ and ‘plagiat psychique’. At the time both authors were represented by POL which, in the wake of the literary scandal, decided to drop Camille Laurens. In turn, she declared that under the circumstances she would not have wished to continue being represented by them. Laurens’s work found a new home in Gallimard, a publishing house she has been with since 2007. A selection of the books she had published at POL have been reissued by Gallimard.

Camille Laurens has been the recipient of a number of prestigious literary awards. Dans ces bras-là was awarded the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot des Lycéens in 2000 and, in 2008, she obtained the Prix Bourgogne de littérature for her anthology Tissé par mille. As of 2006, she is an ‘officier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres’. Laurens also sits on the jury for the Prix Femina and is an avid contributor to the cultural press. In addition, she has collaborated on a variety of theatre, film and musical projects, writing the lyrics for an Indochinese song in 2002. Despite her dismissal of the label autofiction, in 2012 she organised,  with Tom Bishop, the first franco-american conference on the genre at New York University entitled  ‘Autofiction: Literature in France Today’ with speakers including Serge Doubrovsky, Catherine Cusset, Philippe Forest, Catherine Millet, Siri Hustvedt and Rick Moody. In 2011, Léo Schéer published in the collection ‘Écrivains d’aujourd’hui’ the first monograph devoted to the author, containing an extended interview, articles and textes inédits.

Updated by Adina Stroia (Newcastle)