"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.