"Isn't it particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?" Frederic-Yves Jeannet asks Helene 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 Theatre 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.
- ISBN10 0745653871
- ISBN13 9780745653877
- Publish Date 2 November 2012
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Polity Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 224
- Language English