Who is Christine Angot, writer elected member of the Académie Goncourt this Tuesday?

Europe 1 with AFP 4:06 p.m., February 28, 2023

Born to literature in violent conditions, adored or hated for her media interventions, Christine Angot, elected to the Académie Goncourt on Tuesday, sublimated the suffering linked to incest in a work imbued with fury.

The key to understanding Christine Angot is an event recounted several times in her novels: when she was 13, her father reappeared, a man until then absent from her life, who belatedly decided to bequeath her his name.

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This polyglot intellectual turns out to be a rapist who abuses her, still a teenager, and keeps her under his control until she is 26, when she cuts ties with him.

The origin of his desire to write

As she recounts in

, Prix Médicis in 2021, seen as her most luminous book, the contrast is striking between the impunity enjoyed by this man, who shone as an international civil servant, father of a family, notable of Strasbourg, and the wounds of his daughter, flayed alive.

This is the whole origin of his desire to write, a form of revenge and sublimation.

"The violence that is done to me in a personal capacity concerns me, I manage with that", confided Christine Angot to AFP in August 2021.

But with incest, "we are in the unrepresentable. This is why I believe it is so important to write reality, to represent it, even if it's just in a book, just for reading time", she pointed out.

The turning point of his book "Incest" (1999)

Born in 1959, the young girl was raised by her mother in Châteauroux, after the failure of her parents' couple, as she recounts in

(2015), brought to the screen by Catherine Corsini, with Virginie Efira .

Law student, she is destroyed by a last incest, and will never exercise in this field.

Literature is a vocation she discovers at a time of despair.

"It's my passion," she says.

"To write a book, you have to live in it. To write so that the real finds a form. When the form is there, it is a great satisfaction. But living in it is not easy. There is a satisfaction in Achieving this, day after day, for me living in a book is the greatest joy. And when I can't get into a book, life interests me much less", continues the novelist.

His first works obtain only a success of esteem.

But with

in 1999, his talent exploded.

"Here are many things that we do not utter, and especially that we do not write, in a society of soft, light", enthuses the critic Josyane Savigneau in

.

This will be even more true with a novel heavy with descriptions of sexual relations with his father,

(2012).

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clashes on television

Sometimes mocked for less consistent stories like

(2008), where the double of the author and rapper Doc Gynéco, her companion at the time, Christine Angot cares little for criticism.

Austere to deceive, hating to be photographed and absent from social events, she expresses the essence of her truth in her work, which she comments on little but makes discover during public readings.

Her eruptive side is sometimes expressed in television interventions, such as the one where she launches to François Fillon, presidential candidate in 2017: "You will stop at nothing! Your word is dishonest".

A clash that caught the attention of Laurent Ruquier who entrusted her with the role of columnist in his weekly meeting on Saturday evening,

on France 2. A short-lived adventure that will generate its share of controversy.

"Television interested me, that's for sure," Christine Angot told AFP.

"There were times, I wouldn't say on all the shows, but almost always, when I got home I said to myself: there was a little thing. That was enough for me, this feeling".