"Isn't it ... particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?"
Frédéric-Yves Jeannet asks Hélène Cixous in this fascinating book of
interviews. "[I]t's only in writing, on paper, ... that I reach the
most unknown, the strangest, the most advanced part of me for me. I feel
closer to my own mystery in the aura of writing it," Cixous responds.
These conversations, which took place over three years and cover the
creative process behind Cixous's fictional writing, illuminate the
genesis and particular genius of one of France's most original writers.
Cixous muses on her "coming to writing," from her first publications to
her recent acclaim for a series of fictional texts that spring, as, she
insists all true writing does, from her life: the loss of her father
when she was a child, and her relationship with her mother, now in her
tenth decade, as well as with such friends as Jacques Derrida and
Jacques Lacan. The conversations delve into Cixous's career as an
academic in Paris and abroad, her summer retreats to the Bordeaux region
to write uninterrupted for two months, her work with Ariane Mnouchkine's
Théàtre du Soleil, her political engagements and her dreams. Readers and
writers who have followed Cixous's path-blazing career as a fiction
writer who crosses boundaries of genre and gender while posing essential
questions about the nature of narrative and life will find this a book
that cannot be put down.
