Sagan, Paris 1954

by Anne Berest, Heather Lloyd (Translator)

Before Françoise Sagan the literary icon there was Françoise Quoirez, an eighteen-year-old Parisian girl, who wrote a novel.

This intimate narrative charts the months in 1954 leading up to the publication of the legendary Bonjour Tristesse. We encounter Françoise, her family and friends close-up, in a post-war world that is changing radically; and Mlle Quoirez, in her new guise of Françoise Sagan, will be at the heart of that social change.

Anne Berest was writing her third novel when Sagan's son, Denis Westhoff, asked her to write a book to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Bonjour Tristesse.

Genres: France, Biography, Nonfiction, Ebooks, French Literature

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2014

About the author

Anne Berest is the bestselling co-author of How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are (Doubleday, 2014) and the author of a novel based on the life of French writer Françoise Sagan. With her sister Claire, she is also the author of Gabriële, a critically acclaimed biography of her great-grandmother, Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, Marcel Duchamp’s lover and muse. She is the great-granddaughter of the painter Francis Picabia. For her work as a writer and prize-winning showrunner, she has been profiled in publications such as French Vogue and Haaretz newspaper. The recipient of numerous literary awards, The Postcard was a finalist for the Goncourt Prize and has been a long-selling bestseller in France.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Beyond knowing her name, I knew almost nothing about Francoise Sagan before starting this book. I still don’t feel I know much. The book had its impetus in the stated title; but it’s not really about Sagan in Paris in 1954, though those elements run through it.

A given nowadays about creative nonfiction is that you may write of things not strictly true if they are in the spirit of truth, but you need to be clear about what you’re doing. From the beginning Berest is crystal-clear she’s “appropriating [Sagan] for myself, just as a portrait painter imposes his own profile on the portrait of the sitter.” (I had issues with several of Berest’s metaphors.) As to including herself in the story, Berest says if this wasn’t wanted, she shouldn’t have been asked. (Here, she sounds defiant; later, her tone will be more apologetic.)

Sometimes her prose seemed simplistic (translation choices?) and sometimes repetitive for such a short book. Berest describes how her own life has gotten in the way of the assignment she accepted at the behest of Sagan’s son—he wants his mother not to be forgotten sixty years after the publication of her first book. Due to Berest’s life struggles (she’s going through a divorce), she’ll say that instead of writing one thing about Sagan (for example, her love life), she’ll write about another: insight into an author’s (capricious) choices.

Berest says Sagan inhabited her and credits that for the growth she achieves by the time she finishes writing the book. Two (superfluous) letters Berest wrote to two men--the first (rather condescending) on how she’s different from when she was in her 20s and the other on why she’s written the book the way she has--appear at the end. The second letter contains too much explanation of what her book is, something she’s already made clear, and that should’ve been left to the reader’s intelligence anyway.

Perhaps this book is more for those that already love Sagan, as I’m not left with a desire to read her. And I know her son didn’t want that.

[Antonomasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mélange of biography, recent-historical novel and autofiction: Anne Berest, a French novelist in her early thirties, going through a divorce, is approached to write about the beginning of Françoise Sagan's career. We hear snippets of Berest's life and her feelings about the project alongside chronological vignettes about Sagan - who, whilst she may have changed later, in the mid-fifties never had to take off her rose-tinted glasses: her teenage fantasies of writerly fame came true mere weeks after she handed her first manuscript to publishers.

It was quite interesting to learn about Sagan - and her glamorous world with La Novelle Vague happening on the doorstep - via this breezily readable novella, but I thought Berest missed a trick in saying nothing about a) how much harder it is to get published now, the exponential increase in competition and change in procedures or b) hunger for fame being more unusual in Sagan's day but if some sources are to be believed is near-universal among kids these days... Aside from a few mentions of websites and emails, this book could have been written twenty years ago. I'm not sure how different things are in the French literary world, what with their fortresses against Amazon and preservation of the equivalent of the Net Book Agreement, but French light fiction exists in a fairytale world of being published at the drop of a hat, and meeting famous authors on every street corner, which gets my cynical English back up. I'd far rather some biting humour about how it really is than these fluffy daydreams, and rainbows at the end of which are really only illusion or resentment.

I am rent by ambivalence towards the autofiction element. I felt inspired and invigorated by it. I like writing that way, I like feeling 'given' the freedom to interpolate myself into other material; therapy-speak is too much part of me not to have an affinity with it. Yet I also think that there might be too much memoir about already, and can't we hear about anything now without the intrusion of tedious auto-omphalism? As compromise, I imagined a different structure: Berest's autobiographical paragraphs as an appendix or separate section following the rest. Though however it was organised, this example lacked the depth of insight and/or humour that can make me love memoir-ish writing without reserve: the sections about Sagan were more alive and engaging than about Berest. (My favourite scene was Françoise's process of choosing her user- pen-name whilst looking through Proust.)

Writing fiction about a historical figure whose status towers over one's own is an impertinent and often hubris-filled act: I respect Berest's attempt to produce a book that obliquely recognises this without being mired in self-doubt, but this was as easily consumed, as nutritious and forgettable as a reasonably nice small pâtisserie-cake.

[Linda · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the books that I knew since the beginning - it is either you love it or hate it. The author describes one year in the life of young writer Francoise Sagan. As title states it is 1954, a year when she published her first and possibly the most famous novel of hers - Bonjour tristesse. And this year is told by Anne Berest who was asked to do it by Sagan's son. She tells the story through her own experience of writing it. She tells about her divorce, about her new lover, about different events of her life. And all of the things she writes about herself are somehow connected either to Sagan directly either to the writing process about her. And this might annoy or work incredibly good. In the case of Berest I was actually surprised how well I took it in without sensation that she's bragging or trying too much. I truly admired her honesty about difficulties of writing, about being stuck. It encourages to write. And it also encouraged me to read Bonjour Tristesse.
3,5 stars.

[Yves Gounin · Rating 2 out of 5]

L'histoire est connue : en janvier 1954 François Quoirez envoie un manuscrit à quelques éditeurs parisiens. Enthousiasmé, Julliard accepté aussitôt de la publier.
Problème : Françoise est mineure et n'a pas demandé l'autorisation de ses parents qui la lui donnent finalement, à condition de publier sous pseudonyme.
Françoise emprunte celui d'un personnage de Proust. Elle s'appellera Sagan et entamera, sitôt la publication de "Bonjour tristesse", une vie d'écriture, de succès et d'excès.

Anne Berest raconte cette année 1954 qui vit la jeune inconnue se transformer en phénomène de foire et Sagan percer sous Quoirez.
Elle le fait en entrelaçant la vie de cette adolescente surdouée avec sa vie à elle, femme de 30 ans en pleine séparation avec le père de sa fille.

Ce procédé, qui consiste pour l'écrivain à briser le tabou de la première personne pour parler de lui à l'occasion de l'écriture de son roman, est utilisé par quelques uns des romanciers français les plus stimulants: Annie Ernaux, Catherine Cusset, Emmanuel Carrère, Laurent Binet ...
Très novateur il y a dix ans, il a perdu de son originalité.
Mais le plus grave est qu'il fonctionne mal entre François Sagan et Anne Berest. On ne comprend pas l'écho que suscite chez cette trentenaire, mère de famille, en pleine crise sentimentale, l'histoire de ce "charmant petit monstre" (l'expression est de Mauriac) passée trop vite de l'enfance à l'âge adulte.
Autant on retrouve avec intérêt l'ambiance, très bien restituée et impeccablement documentée, de ces années 50 (l'atmosphère est la même que dans le film "Yves Saint Laurent"). Autant le livre perd tout intérêt lorsqu'il prend la tangente de l'auto-fiction.

[TBV (on hiatus) · Rating 3 out of 5]

1954
WWI is over, but not forgotten. This is the year* in which a precocious eighteen-year-old becomes a literary sensation on the publication of her first novel. That novel is Bonjour tristesse, and the author is of course Françoise Sagan (born Françoise Quoirez, 1935-2004). The novel won the prestigious Prix des Critiques and sold very many copies. Approached by Sagan's son Denis Westhoff to write about his mother, author Anne Berest examines this red letter year in the life of Françoise Sagan.


Ms. Berest presents a rather strange stew of autobiography, biography and biographical fiction. "It is to be neither a biography, nor a journal, nor a novel. Let’s just call it a story.” She talks about her own circumstances and why she is writing about Françoise Sagan, she provides biographical details of Sagan complete with notes of her sources, and she muses and speculates. She interviews people who knew Françoise, including the latter's great friend Florence Malreaux (daughter of French author André Malreaux), she visits places where Françoise had been, and she imagines editor René Julliard as he lies in bed reading the manuscript of Bonjour tristesse after attending a dinner party. She imagines his surprise that an eighteen-year-old girl could write a novel of that calibre, and Ms Berest also imagines the young Françoise's reaction to being published. Ms Berest explains how Françoise arrives at the name Sagan through her love of the works of Marcel Proust.

The details of Françoise Sagan's year of stepping into the limelight as a famous author are interesting enough, but I find Ms Berest's autobiographical interspersions intrusive and of less interest. More Sagan please...

There are some charming photographs in the book. I also enjoyed the snippets of Parisian life at that time.


*As eighteen-year-old Françoise sets off to find a publisher, another boy in another country is also getting ready for an appointment with fame: "At that very moment, on that fourth of January 1954, a boy of the same age – eighteen, to be precise – is recording two songs. It costs him four dollars, which he pays for out of his own pocket, and he records them in a small studio specialising in the black soul music of Memphis.” That boy was Elvis Presley.

[Poppy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is extraordinary and so much more than a run-of-the-mill biography; rather than striving to detail events accurately and maintain an element of objective detachment, I love how Berest admits to 'slip into the mindset of Francoise Sagan... inhabit her life in order to forget [her] own.' The outcome is both a rich account of the months leading up to the publication of Bonjour Tristesse but also an insight into the power of literature through Berest's own heartfelt story of her own journey while researching and writing Sagan's.

Highly recommend, full review to follow in April.

[John Of Oxshott · Rating 4 out of 5]

At times I was a bit sceptical about this book which is presented as a factual account of one year in the life of Françoise Quoirez, leading up to the publication on 15 March 1954, when she was just 17, of her novel Bonjour Tristesse under the pseudonym of Françoise Sagan. It’s a novel that scandalised Paris, won its author the prestigious Prix des Critiques and made her unimaginably wealthy overnight. The award from just the Prix des Critiques was 100,000 francs, which was paid in cash because Françoise didn’t yet have a bank account.

I was sceptical because Sagan, Paris 1954 is a very slim book padded out with many scenes from Anne Berest’s own life as she struggles to write it. What we learn of Françoise Sagan is conveyed in tantalising snippets lifted from interviews or accounts from other sources. Most of the key moments in this crucial year are imaginary flights of fancy by Anne Berest as she contemplates what it means to become a ‘writer’ at such a tender age. At times it reads like her personal journal rather than a biography or literary essay.

She tells us of her meeting with Denis Westhoff, who commissioned the book to keep the memory of Françoise Sagan alive. So it is really a piece of marketing initiated by the novelist’s son. Anne Berest’s friends are critical of her for taking on the project, accusing her of vanity for wanting to associate her own name with that of a literary legend.

There is even a detailed interview with a clairvoyant who has her own opinions on the project, which we are invited to pass over quickly if they are too strange for us to accept. Anne Berest goes on to tell us about her divorce, her fears about losing contact with her daughter, her experiences as a reader in a publishing house and her feelings of being sexually aroused by books at the age of 12.

Most strangely of all, she incorporates the story of a brief fling with a handsome student she meets at a party. This is her first sexual encounter outside of her marriage and she tells us a lot about it. Later, she invites the young man to join her in Saint-Tropez. Then she gives us the long, wistful, philosophical letter that she writes to him when he declines because he can’t afford the fare and doesn’t want her to pay for him.

You could argue that none of this has to anything do with Françoise Sagan or the literary significance of Bonjour Tristesse. And yet it is all very interesting, at times very moving, and consistently thought-provoking. For what Anne Berest is doing is letting the spirit of the young, fearless, Françoise Quoirez, enter into her and guide her life as she is living it now. The book was actually published in 2014 to mark the 10th anniversary of Françoise Sagan’s death (she died in September 2004 at the age of 69, a fact that hardly registered in the English-speaking press at all).

But, crucially, Anne Berest is also using her own experiences to help her understand what Françoise Sagan must have been feeling in the days leading up to the publication of her first novel. All the details I have mentioned are brought to bear on this significant year of 1954 and reflect a mood, a circumstance or a thoughtful inference drawn from the life of Françoise Sagan.

Not only is there nothing wrong with this approach but it’s also what we all, probably, do as readers, and what I do to some extent when I write reviews on Goodreads. I first read this book some years ago. My daughter gave it to me after I’d been encouraging her to write her own scandalous bestseller in the spirit of Bonjour Tristesse. In the intervening years I’d forgotten almost everything about both books so I decided to have a quick re-read of them as a follow-up to reading Conversations With Friends by Sally Rooney, which some professional reviewers compared to Bonjour Tristesse (and with which I disagreed).

Being a gift from my daughter in response to a conversation about her writing gives this book a personal resonance which no doubt enhanced my enjoyment of it. I think it is fitting, therefore, to give some small extracts from Anne Berest’s letter to the young student who didn’t want to join her in Saint-Tropez, but who had previously asked her if she had always wanted to be a writer.

“Yes, I have always wanted to write, long before I knew what it really means to write … I tried my best to make my life the story — whereas writing means the very opposite of that. Writing means putting your life on hold … cutting back on the story of your own life. My other problem was that I had a very lofty idea of what I had to write in order to become a ‘writer’, such a lofty idea that I didn’t manage to write anything … But one day … I said to myself: You will never be Sagan. You will never write Bonjour Tristesse at 17, it’s much too late for you. But you will write ‘your books’ … That day, thanks to Françoise Sagan, I wrote the first page of my first novel … With every page I hear my heart beating out: So, that way of life is possible.”

Françoise Sagan became a living legend but she began, at the age of 17, as an ordinary person. I was reminded, while reading Sagan, Paris 1954 of another book about creativity: Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland:

“If art is made by ordinary people, then you’d have to allow that the ideal artist would be an ordinary person too, with the whole usual mixed bag of traits that real human beings possess.”

There is a wealth of insight packed into that simple sentence and it shines a light not only on the mentality of those who would create art but also on those many artists whose works we resist because we see them first and foremost as flawed human beings.

Françoise Sagan was not always liked or admired by the media or the French public. The final decade of her life was overshadowed by her entanglement in a corruption case involving the French petrol giant Elf. She was convicted of tax fraud in 2002 and for years had been a subject of media disapproval because of her lifelong addiction to drugs, drink and gambling.

Anne Berest neatly avoids the tragedies to come by focusing on the year 1954. Still, it must be remembered that one of the first articles published that year referred to her by the famous phrase of a “charming little monster.”

But by framing this account of that year within her own life story and her personal growth as a writer, Anne Berest has turned this book into a celebration of Françoise Sagan as a muse who can inspire you to write fearlessly, to write quickly, with the confidence of youth, so that you can do your own best work as a writer.

It’s an elegant, beautiful achievement. Not only have I lost my initial cynicism about it, but I now see it as an uplifting and moving meditation on the creative process that deserves a place in every writer’s library.

[Mandy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Francoise Sagan’s son Denis Westhoff asked novelist Anne Berest to write a book marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of Bonjour Tristesse. What Berest came up with is this admittedly self-indulgent but ultimately quite enjoyable meditation on Sagan, the publication of the book and her own relation to writing. I found the story of the publication and the description of 1950s French literary life and the characters who moved within it very interesting indeed. There’s an immediacy to Berest’s writings at times that make the milieu come to life, and her descriptions of Sagan’s introduction to the world of publishing is very atmospheric. I was bothered by the mélange of fact and fiction, however – although the writing seems authentic Berest herself admits she has let her imagination run wild at times and simply made up scenes. But at the end, I couldn’t help wondering what the point of this book is. It appears to be more about Berest’s own interior life rather than Sagan’s – and Sagan’s has been examined far more objectively elsewhere. So a cautious “yes” to this very French book, as it has left me with a vivid picture of Sagan doing the rounds in Paris when her fame was just beginning to blossom, and that at least was compelling.

[Ruth Brumby · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fascinating to read about the year in Sagan's life when Bonjour Tristesse was published. Anne Berest researched thoroughly and conveys the places, clothes, people and music so that they feel totally real and immediate. I enjoyed the presence Anne herself in the book because it contributed to this immediacy and because, especially at the beginning, the structure was elegant and the layering interesting. However Sagan herself did not quite emerge from the various views of her: those of friends, critics, press, photographs, biographer etc. To some extent this is part of the point - the past and especially certain characters/celebrities are impenetrable. But, for me, the book ended with just too much of the biographer and not enough of the subject.

[Candice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Je ne suis probablement pas objective car j’adore Anne Berest. Il ne faut pas s’attendre à une biographie de Françoise Sagan. Je me suis volontiers laissée transporter dans le Paris des années 50 en compagnie de Françoise Sagan, dans le 6e entre le café de Flore et la brasserie Lipp, sur le pont des arts, dans l’appartement familial boulevard Malesherbes, au volant de sa vieille Buick. J’ai apprécié les confidences de Berest sur sa propre vie personnelle et j’ai noté beaucoup de ses références qui constitueront mes prochaines lectures.

[Emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

VERDICT: Unusual novel, written at the occasion of Bonjour Tristesse‘s 60th anniversary. It focuses on the last months that led Françoise Sagan to her resounding success, and offers interesting snippets in the life of an eighteen year old writer.

see my full review:
http://wordsandpeace.com/2015/09/27/b...

[Elizabeth Barelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written, every word well chosen, every paragraph its sense of poetry. Incredibly creative sense of narration mixing fiction, biography and auto-biography. Never read anything like that before.

[Bookish Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this book because I love Sagan so her story will always fascinate me - her swave intelligence, her 'not-give-a-f*ck' attitude, her liberated approach to relationships. She's wild. I love that.

[Ernie · Rating 2 out of 5]

1954 is the key word in this title so it is not another biography of Sagan. It is, as the writer tells me, one commissioned by Sagan’s brother to show his sister as the person she was, before she became ‘the legend’. Sagan met Calvino, and Berest uses his kind of postmodern metafiction style, addressing the reader and making comments about her writing tasks, even to the point of writing about her depression and not having written anything in ten days. She writes: ‘the book is taking on a strange form, somewhere between a novel, a biography and a fictionalised autobiography about friendship’. When she writes about being under the spell of Sagan and having sex with ‘the blond’, a young male university student whom she allows to cut her hair with kitchen scissors and to whom she includes a long letter in the text, I would rather be reading about Sagan and her emergence as a writer from her wealthy middle class family, ‘before the legend’ as her brother wanted. I didn’t need her to tell me at length about her meeting with a clairvoyant who told her that writing about Sagan ‘will help you grow.’

What I did read about Sagan was interesting. Berest compares her with Elvis Presley and Brigitte Bardot born at a similar time, ‘children who will overturn the rules, will fascinate men and seduce youth.’ She investigates the naivety of those who ‘do not visualise just what the consequences of winning’ literary prizes can be and makes an apt comparison with the two seventeen year old girls, Sagan and her best friend Florence Malraux on the Metro ‘all dressed like their mothers’, before and after at luxury hotels, the Brasserie Lipp and the Cafe Les Deux Magots.

On the one hand, Sagan is the rebel who, at 13, wagged school successfully for three months being a flaneur on the streets of Paris, but on the other being the conformist who wanted to get married and have children like everybody else in her privileged family. She was totally indulged by her sophisticated parents who were friends with people like Malraux and Pompidou. Her father read Bonjour Tristesse in manuscript without any alarm and allowed her to date with a man 11 years older. She has no anxiety about her novel being accepted by a publisher and buys a Jaguar XK120 sports car with an advance payment for a first novel that would astonish any published writer then or now.

Despite the avowed intent to write about her only in 1954, the year of publication, Berest does not resist the temptation to imagine more about her life in the fifties and the sixties, meeting Calvino, Duras, Pasolini, Williams and Hemingway, the devastating car crash and her succession of fast and expensive cars including a Ferrari. She comments, ‘What a lunatic thing, fame is’ but this was more the subject of the biographers. Sagan 1954 interested me in its revelation of the girl who wanted and got the freedom of her brother to live as boys of 18 could, and use the indulgence of her father to enter the social world of Paris, celebrating the freedoms of liberation after the shame of the Occupation as one who was ‘never afraid of anything’.

[Debbie Robson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Berest opens this wonderful hybrid memoir with an imagined scene. Cocteau has just been dropped off to near his home in the early hours of 1 January 1954. He passes a young couple - the boy with the Joan of Arc haircut pulling the girl along.
“The man watches the two figures as they scuttle through the cold of that early morning. He notices the way they pull each other along by the arm, like two crabs heading in the direction of the Seine.”
Coming back to this book to review it I realised immediately how the writing draws you in. No wonder I finished it in days. I was at first, though, surprised by how much Berest is in this memoir, mentioning on the second page:
“My book is to be a journal of the year 1954, telling the story of the few months leading up to publication of Bonjour Tristesse.
A few months is not a very long time.
But I am going through one of the most painful periods of my life. Since the summer, I have been separated from the father of my daughter. I am weighed down by misery and I feel like a suitcase without a handle.
I am going to put an end to my grief through work. Night and day I am going to think about Sagan; day and night she will be my companion.”
Irresistible isn’t it? But it works because Berest provides the framework and also provides much needed information regarding Sagan that I feel would read quite differently in a traditional memoir. Berest brings the French perspective.
In several scenes the author describes strange coincidences whilst researching this book. In one of my favourite scenes Berest decides to visit a fortune teller, just as Francoise Sagan did when she was young. To Berest’s surprise the fortune teller remarks that she can see Berest is writing a book on someone’s life. She then names Sagan. Berest then details the conversation remarking that it is all true. I feel it is, as a reader but the scene also reveals how Sagan was treated in later life and with the author experiencing this encounter it is doubly moving. Here is part of the conversation with the fortune teller:
“I am seeing Francoise Sagan - that correct, isn’t it?”
“From beyond the grave, she is wondering why society wished to destroy her. She is asking herself that question, she is asking you that question. Just like a tsunami, just as when the sea comes up and lays waste to everything, so society took everything back from her. Why?
...”She is trying to understand why she went from being an idol to a woman who was hated.”
Berest helps the reader understand why and delves deep into the life of the young rebel that was Francoise Sagan in 1954. One of my two favourite books so far of 2023. Highly recommended.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s nothing more powerful to me, nothing more deserving of five stars, than a book that plays with the conventions of structure and language. Sagan Paris 1954 is a brilliant semi-biography, indebted to the innovations of autotheory, in which Anne Berest narrates not only the life of Françoise Sagan but also her own writing process, the making of the book, and her divorce.

The postmodern reflexivity of her form mirrors the existentialist themes in Sagan’s life, while imagined responses to current events—both in 1954 and today—deepen the context. Writing is a cosmology: a product of its circumstances and a response to them, yet also a way of writing destiny into existence—proof of “how good it is to turn a lie into the truth.”

Rather than aligning herself with a mythic figure or treating publication as an ineffable power divorced from craft, Berest writes with striking humility, laying bare the labor of creation and the nature of research itself. It becomes a one-sided confessional between two writers across time. The result recalls Nathalie Léger’s “Suite for Barbara Loden,” Jennifer Croft’s transliterative wordplay, and—though less academic—a kindred register to Rachel Cusk’s views of gender in writing spaces. Like these works, it blurs memoir and criticism into a singular, self-aware text.

This genre-defying, unabashedly sexy novella lets the seed of specificity grow under a caring hand into a topiary of singular design in the City of Light—pure art in both conception and execution.

[Tracy Shephard · Rating 4 out of 5]

'Without Sagan, Life would be deadly boring'.  Bernard Frank. 

My love of France and all things French has broadened  my love and interest in French fiction and translations. 

I had heard of the book Bonjour Tristesse but never thought much about the author.

Sagan, Paris 1954 takes a look at the life of Francoise Sagan, as an 18 year old awaiting publication of her first novel. In 1954,women were still left in the shadows and are quite frankly expected to stay there. But Paris is changing and so is Francoise. 

Francoise is ambitious and is allowed by her parents who clearly adored her, to live a little more freely.  We soon learn how a tragedy in the family enables her to be so free and why she is so loved and cherished. 

This is a good read, and what it does best is, that it presses the reader to seek out more information about the life and loves of this charismatic lady and author.

Sagan, Paris 1954 gives just a glimpse of Sagan's life, and I loved how the author's situation in life was carried parallel to Sagan's.  

This was an interesting read and of course has spurred me to discover more about the life and loves of one of France's most controversial writers.

[UlysseRoche InOneLine · Rating 4 out of 5]

When you write on your favourite writer, when you write on writing, when you write on a dream, you don't find an answer to the question you ask -- you reveal the beauty of the question.

Lorsqu'on écrit sur son écrivain fétiche, lorsqu'on écrit sur l'écriture, lorsqu'on écrit sur un rêve, on ne perce pas l'énigme posée -- on la rend plus belle.

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked reading Francoise Sagan’s books in my youth, so after finishing Postcard by Anne Berest I was curious to see what she could write about Sagan. I was more impressed by how she wrote than what exactly was revealed of Sagan’s biography. This little book is like a glass of good white wine-light, playful and with good aftertaste -recommended.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful read

I enjoyed this narrow slip of a book because the writer approached the subject with just right amount of enthusiasm and heart to make it enjoyable yet avoid mawkish hero worship.

[Isabelle Kennedy-Grimes · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book I’m glad I read:) I’ve read both Sagan’s and Berest’s fiction which I loved and it was lovely to see the two writers brought together, their lives and experiences of writing woven together in this memoir/biography. Some really inspiring sentiment about what it is to be a writer too.

[The Contented · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely read. Novel way to write a biography.

[Fondantsurprise · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd biography in that it tells us much about the author, too. But I enjoyed it.

[Jola Cora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adoré. Fini à Agrigento, avec vue sur le temple de Concordia ♥️

[miss.mesmerized mesmerized · Rating 5 out of 5]

The last days before the unknown girl Françoise Quoirez turns into one of the most sought-after writer of her time, idol of her fellows and icon of her time. The year 1954 marked the turning point, when she offered her manuscript of “Bonjour tristesse” to three publishing houses and to her family’s astonishment was immediately accepted. A star in literature was born, in those days which also marked the beginning of Brigitte Bardot’s career as an actress and Paris was the centre of the global intellectual and cultural life. Françoise, now named Sagan, was suddenly catapulted into the middle of it.

Already for I long time I have admired Françoise Sagan’s writing, not just the best known “Bonjour tristesse”, but also “Aimez-vous Brahms” left me thinking for weeks after reading it. Anne Berest’s way of approaching the phenomenon is quite unique: she is not providing another biography with an accurate account of what happened exactly in this year. She uses print materials as well as interviews and memories of companions to create a partly invented and partly accurate description of the last days of Françoise Quoirez and the first days of Françoise Sagan. This is mixed with her own thoughts in the process of writing and the problems in the writing process itself. The result is an interesting book which is always entertaining to read and makes you feel like part of the process of approaching the phenomenon Françoise Sagan.

Apart from the protagonist, you also get a deep insight in the French culture and society of the 1950s, it is often just side remarks that reveal a lot about the time.

[Hélène Wilkinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce livre, qui se lit comme une nouvelle, est une description de Françoise Sagan et de son milieu, juste avant la publication du premier roman de Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse. On connaît le succès tonitruant qui a suivi la parution de cette œuvre d’une jeune fille de 19 ans, sans aucun bagage littéraire. Mais avant cela, il y a simplement eu un auteur débutant et un éditeur chevronné.

Ce serait forcer le trait que de dire que j’ai pris autant de plaisir à lire Sagan 1954 que Bonjour Tristesse, mais je dois dire que ce livre fait partie de mes lectures non romanesques préférées du moment. J’ai aimé «Paris, 1954. Sagan bouscule le monde de l’édition ». J’ai aimé les éléments purement biographiques sur Sagan, j’ai appris des choses que je ne savais pas, mais je n’ai pas non plus été assommée par une biographie complète et hyper analytique. J’ai aimé la description de l’espèce d’affolement qui a suivi le succès phénoménal de Bonjour Tristesse. Et j’ai aimé avoir une excellente excuse pour relire ce qui est pour moi le roman d’adolescence par excellence, tout comme l’est Catcher In The Rye outre-Atlantique.

Et après m’être demandé si cela était vraiment utile, j’ai fini par aimer les incursions autobiographiques dans la narration, avec les interludes introspectifs de l’auteur sur son histoire d’amour qui finit mal. Ces intermèdes ne servent pas à grand chose, ce serait dommage de s’en priver quand même, tout cela est à la fois pertinent et pas, vrai et faux, sincère et affecté ; l’auteur devient ainsi au fil des pages un vrai personnage de Sagan…

[Catherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

50 ans après, Anne Berest s’attache à nous raconter 1954 ,année immortelle, s’il en est, pour être celle de la naissance d’une écrivaine hors norme, Madame Françoise Sagan, avec la parution de Bonjour tristesse.
C’est magnifique ! ce n’est pas tout à fait une biographie, ni tout à fait une autofiction. C’est un moment magnifique à passer en compagnie d’Anne Berest qui nous invite à l’ écouter. Elle nous offre en partage les réflexions qui lui viennent sur sa propre vie et ses choix à la lumière de ceux de Françoise Sagan. Elle s’y est plongée à la demande du fils de Sagan pour la rédaction d’un livre dont le principal objet serait l’ année 54.
Une oeuvre toute à fait originale qui donne envie de lire encore et toujours plus Sagan, Berest et tant d’autre. Rarement je termine un livre avec l’envie de relire tous les livres dont elle parle et qui ont croisés mon chemin, mais plus encore l'envie de lire tous ceux que j’ai ratés! Alors c’est un livre à lire absolument si l'on aime Sagan si l'on aime Berest , mais surtout si l’on veut sourire en fermant la dernière page, tout à la satisfaction d’avoir passé le plus délicieux des moments en merveilleuse compagnie. Merci Madame Berest pour ce moment d' insoupçonnable plaisir.

[Christine Dolan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just devoured this book. It has flaws, the main one being that the author insists on drawing parallels between herself and Sagan, which means that the book becomes as much about her as it is about Sagan. However, I still thought it was a great read. I was fascinated by all the details of life in Paris in 1954. Can it be that in my lifetime there were still knife grinders on the street? I loved Sagan's attitude towards life, lving it to the full, in anticipation of the feminism still to come.

Maybe this is a book for older readers. I am not sure. But for me it was a relief to read something so well written and endlessly fascinating.

[Eileen Hall · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating account of the publication of the world famous novel Bonjour Tristesse.
This is set, prior to publication, in Paris in 1954. It is also about the author Francoise Sagan, real name Francoise Quirez, her family and friends living in a city in the midst of dramatic change.
I was given a digital copy of this book by the publisher Gallic Books via Netgalley in return for an honest unbiased review.

[Laurent · Rating 3 out of 5]

La naissance de Sagan racontée 60 ans plus tard par l'une de ses disciples littéraires - ou tout du moins qui se prétend l'être.
Une mise en abyme littéraire qui sombre au fur et à mesure dans des profondeurs narcissiques irritantes.
Dommage, car le style est alerte et la construction intelligente.
Un biautographie originale donc mais qui manque de modestie.