Family differences: French lawsuit shows dangers of rise in autofiction

The Polish poet Czestaw Mitosz is credited with the quote: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished” - aline that was given fresh resonance this week by a French court case.

- Philip Oltermann

In contemporary European literature, thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife are undergoing a sustained boom across the continent and increasingly leading to family reunions in courtrooms.

One happened on Wednesday, when the French historian Cécile Desprairies was sued for defamation by her brother and a cousin over the depiction of her late mother and her great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste (The Propagandist).

The plaintiffs said in their legal complaint: “The author’s resentment toward the targeted individuals permeates the entire work, which is conceived as a genuine act of family vengeance.” They claimed there was an “absence of evidence” for the novel’s central plot, a woman’s collaboration with the Nazis, and asked forthe book tobe withdrawn fromthe market and pulped.

The novel was longlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2023 and, in Natasha Lehrer’s English translation, praised asa “clever and vivid book” by the Guardian. Init, the narrator, Coline, tells the story of her morphine-addicted mother, Lucie, betrothed in her first marriage toa “convinced pro-Nazi” and designer of propaganda posters during the Vichy occupation.

While the author has rejected the book’s classification as a roman A clef - a novel in which real people are thinly disguised as fictional characters - she has made nosecret of beinginspired by her own childhood. “Most of the protagonists I was able to draw inspiration from were dead, sothere’sa liberation of speech,” she told French television in 2023.