An obsessive and revealing self-portrait of a remarkable woman humiliated by the circumstances of her birth and by her physical appearance, La Btarde relates Violette Leduc's long search for her own identity through a series of agonizing and passionate love affairs with both men and women. When first published, La Btarde earned Violette Leduc comparisons to Jean Genet for the frank depiction of her sexual escapades and immoral behavior. A confession that contains portraits of several famous French authors, this book is more than just a scintillating memoir—like that of Henry Miller, Leduc's brilliant writing style and attention to language transform this autobiography into a work of art.

Violette Leduc was born the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl and was encouraged to write by Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir. Her first novel (L'Asphyxie ; In the Prison of Her Skin) was published by Camus for Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet. She went on to write eight more books, including Ravages, L'Affamee, and La Folie en tete ( Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

"Notoriety aside, Leduc is first and foremost a first-rate writer. Not someone who just tells a provocative story and is unafraid to reveal the most offensive parts of her personality and of her experience, but someone who is in love with words, struggles with them, wrestles with language, dies for adjectives, is tortured by her search for le mot juste."—Women's Review of Books

"Whoever speaks to us from the depths of his loneliness speaks to us of ourselves. In La Btarde , a woman is descending into the most secret part of herself and telling us about all she finds there with an unflinching sincerity, as though there were no one listening."—Simone de Beauvoir

"La Btarde is one of the most extraordinary books to have come out of France in some time."—Kirkus