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In both her life and her writing, Constance Debré challenges the conventional norms of gender, class and identity. In her 2018 work, Play boy, Debré intertwines her personal and literary coming out as a lesbian, marking a radical departure from the life she had been living until that point. In her subsequent works, Love Me Tender (2020) and Nom (2022), Debré further rejects traditional roles related to family, career and motherhood. This article examines Debré’s engagement with queer praxis as an author, interpreting this trilogy as a counter-narrative that resists dominant cultural scripts, particularly those tied to heteronormativity and bourgeois values. By foregrounding her rejection of societal norms, Debré constructs a narrative of autonomy that challenges fixed identities and advocates for an ambiguous freedom found in solitude. Through her ongoing life-writing project, Debré crafts an antinormative self-portrait and offers an alternative vision of individual experience living within and against societal structures. This approach provides a critical lens for examining the role queer praxis plays in life writing, situating Debré within broader discussions of resistance in contemporary French autofiction as she disrupts gendered, sexual and class-based expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many life-writing projects, the seemingly innocuous description of heteroclite objects and how those objects are stored and recalled in fact plays an important role in demonstrating their importance to the process of memory work. At once the lingering traces of one's past and also an aggregation of stories evoked by an examination of them, these curios focus attention on the relationship between the individual and the storage of memories. This article will focus on certain collectibles, collections and collectors that appear throughout the fictional, autobiographical and autofictional world that Marie Nimier has scripted to date. This textual cabinet of curiosities and the act of collecting more generally serve as a trope to connect memory with materiality, despite the numerous narrative voices that Nimier assumes--voices that move from a first-person 'Marie Nimier' to an unnamed, although clearly identifiable first-person and even float between genders. Despite this nominal and narrational fluidity, objects function to guarantee recognition, both for the reader, and, especially, for the author herself. What is at stake in this intertextual assemblage of objects is not only the roles that they play in allowing the narrator to revisit past traumas and loss, but also in connecting the author's presence to other, more fictionalized voices that above all signify the primacy of life-writing in her corpus. Keywords Marie Nimier, life-writing, memory, collections, The practice of life writing takes many textual forms, crosses numerous literary genres and even opens the space of the text to reinforce notions of connectivity between author and reader [...]

This article explores continuities and divergences in Catherine Breillat's 2009 autobiographical text and 2013 autofictional film, Abuse of Weakness. The fait divers at the center of both projects--the "Rocancourt Affair"--is complicated by and rendered more egregious due to Breillat's compromised physical status following a cerebral hemorrhage. This article considers the ways in which Breillat reclaims her artistic autonomy and ontological agency by adapting the fait divers in the medium of text and image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]