A young woman meets a middle aged writer in the park; she is a literature student, he needs a heroine for his new book on ‘a girl disclosing the secrets of her life’. She is in awe just because he is a writer, he takes her for a drink, gets his notebook out and asks about her childhood. A series of inconclusive meetings ensue, family reminiscences and much anxiety over awaited phone calls, until it dawns on Elisa that she is letting herself down as a woman because of some old-of-date fantasies.


As often in such tales of seduction, the conquest matters more than the pleasure itself; this is hedonism betraying actual self-obsession. Elisa is not exactly an ingénue — ‘Farouche, me? I love getting picked up’— yet she has a naiveté that she associates with her provincialism — ‘I am not used to smart places’ — and that strange combination of cocky self-assurance and uneasiness makes her very touching. The middle-aged writer lives, breathes and talks clichés. The thought that she might be talented does not even cross his mind; at which point she stops seeing herself as an object, deciding that she will write her story herself.


This is a sexy, tongue-in-cheek novel with a witty twist, setting up the myth of ‘the writer’ to demolish it without pity. It isn’t much kinder to the young woman looking for Pygmalion, but at least Elisa grows up and plucks up the courage to become herself. Sharp, female erotic fiction used to be written with pseudonyms, but not anymore, and there also seems to be an autobiographical dimension here.

‘My childhood also reminds me of a smell. That of books. They were not made of words but of mingled scents. Face powder, old fur, worn leather, Bourjois soap, dust and that indefinable perfume which sticks to clothes worn intimately by relatives who have died a long time ago. I would read in a wardrobe. An oak wardrobe, as wide as the wall. I spent hours in it, permitting myself as little air and light as possible. It contained a hundred or so children’s books and comics, hat boxes, a super-8 film projector, four or five panamas each fitting one on top of the other, a mahogany casket crammed with singed lace and reels of cotton, the wardrobe of a grandfather, of two grand-mothers, of a mother who kept her wedding dress there and a ten-year-old child curled up like an Inca mummy on the throne which the pile of books formed.’ p10