Pierrette Fleutiaux

Pierrette Fleutiaux was born in 1941 in Guéret, in the Creuse. Her mother was a teacher in the Natural Sciences; her father was Director of the École Normale d’Instituteurs. She recalls a childhood spent between the rural life and rhythms of her grandparents’ farm and voracious reading in the school library. Fleutiaux was influenced by her close proximity to the Normalien students, one of whom she later married. She studied English at the University of Poitiers and passed the Agrégation teaching exam at the Sorbonne. She also studied at Limoges, Bordeaux and London. In the 1960s, Fleutiaux lived for some time in New York with her first husband. She describes her time in the city as a ‘liberation’, noting in particular the daunting and freeing potential created by daily life in another language. It was in New York that Fleutiaux wrote her first book, while also working at the French lycée in the city and for the United Nations as well as in other small jobs. She also had a son in America. Eventually Fleutiaux and her family returned to France and she then taught at the Lycée Chaptal in Paris for the rest of her career until her retirement in the early 2000s.

Fleutiaux’s first novel, Histoire de la chauve-souris, was published in 1975. This text introduces the continual preoccupations of her work: with women’s lived experience, with moments of crisis and adventure which enable transformation, with the unknown, and with the ongoing need to engage in dialogue with both the inner and outer worlds in the act of co-creating the self. These themes were developed further in Histoire du tableau (1977) alongside a more intense focus on creativity. Fleutiaux’s 1985 collection of reworked fairy tales, Métamorphoses de la reine expands these themes beyond the individual in its direct engagement with the situation of women in male-dominated imaginary and de facto landscapes of power and control within romantic relationships (the relationship with parents is a significant sub-theme). Métamorphoses de la reine won the Prix Goncourt de la nouvelle. Fleutiaux also won the Prix Fémina for her 1990 novel Nous sommes éternels, which was also the forum in which she engaged explicitly with historical events for the first time. This novel is arguably also her most significant work of fiction, although it has received little academic attention and was widely misjudged in the contemporaneous reviews. Relationship questions, once again both lived and imagined, were foregrounded in a much more light-hearted context in Allons-nous être heureux? (1994).

In 1997 Fleutiaux published L’Expédition, her first foray into the arena of women’s leadership and pioneering, themes which continue into her later works, as her narrators mature. This novel, based on her own visit to Easter Island, depicts the adventures of a group of women (and one man) to explore the ‘mystery of the world’ and allows Fleutiaux to revisit and renew the historically male-dominated genre of adventure narratives through her woman narrator’s lived experience. In 2001, Fleutiaux referred to this as her ‘favourite’ novel, while noting that it was not so well received by everyone else. 

Published following the death of Fleutiaux’s own mother, Des Phrases courtes, ma chérie (2003) examines the narrator-daughter’s changing relationship with her ageing mother, and foregrounds the invisibility of older women, and the continual renegotiations required between daughter and mother in establishing a relationship that balances mutual affection, support and independence. The novel won the Prix pour la France du meilleur roman étranger 2001 from People’s Literature Publishing House, China.  Fleutiaux’s 2005 Les Amants imparfaits takes a radically different turn from her other works, highlighting the dangers of women’s failure to individuate, through the unreliable voice and flawed introspection of Raphael, a rare male narrator in Fleutiaux’s oeuvre. These underlying tensions persist in more subtle forms in La Saison de mon contentement (2008), published after the 2007 presidential campaign of Ségolène Royal, which details the narrator’s unexpected happiness at the sight of a woman in a place of high power, alongside her outrage at the relentless sexism directed towards the candidate. In Bonjour, Anne (2010) Fleutiaux returns to earlier questions of visibility and transmission at play in the narrator’s search for and rediscovery of the life and work of an older woman mentor. These themes linger in Loli le temps venu (2013), an account of a grandmother’s relationship with her young granddaughter, which includes reflections on the portrayal of older women and of childhood in art and literature. Fleutiaux’s most recent work is Destiny (2016), a novel about the older woman narrator’s interaction with a young Nigerian woman immigrant in difficult circumstances, and an exploration of the strength and precariousness of the younger woman.

Fleutiaux’s oeuvre extends beyond these more substantial fictional works to children’s literature, short story collections, a photo novel, an illustrated fiction, and some comment pieces for newspapers and magazines. She appears on French television and her work is translated into several languages. 

Compiled by Elizabeth Sercombe