Most memoirists are burdened with the question of how to make their relatively unexceptional lives interesting enough for public consumption – a question whose answers are generally sought in the quality or distinctiveness of the prose. Vanessa Springora may have been faced with the opposite problem: the raw elements of her story are so extraordinary that the material risks upstaging the form.
When her account of her relationship in the mid-Eighties with the French author Gabriel Matzneff – which took place when she was 14 and he 50 – was published in France in January 2020, it inaugurated what has been described as “a #MeToo moment for France’s literary circles”.
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