February 14, 2018
In November of last year, as charges of sexual abuse filled the news, the English translation of “L’Inceste,” by the French writer Christine Angot, arrived in American bookstores. First published in 1999, the book describes, with unsparing precision, a woman’s incestuous relationship with her father, which began when she was fourteen and continued into her late twenties. The narrator, also a middle-aged writer named Christine Angot, embarks on an obsessive relationship with a woman (her first), suffers a manic-depressive breakdown, and recalls, in the process, her father’s abusive coercion. In interviews, Angot has repeatedly—if obliquely—claimed this experience of incest as her own. She told a French journalist that, when she was twenty-eight, she attempted to file charges against her father, but the officer said that too much time had passed. "The only thing worthwhile is literature,” she told the writer. “Justice, the police, it's nothing.”
In France, the book sold seventy thousand copies in the first three months of its release—a huge number there—and vaulted Angot to literary celebrity. French Elle published a joint interview with her and Michel Houellebecq, accompanied by a photograph of the two writers in bed: the irreverent darlings of the fin-de-millénaire Parisian literary scene. Today, Angot remains a prominent public intellectual, notorious for her operatic outbursts. On a recent TV talk-show panel, Angot had a furious disagreement with Sandrine Rousseau, a politician who had recently accused an M.P. of sexual harassment, which left both women in tears. Earlier this month, she lambasted the recent crop of actors who have disavowed their work with Woody Allen, dismissing them as hypocritical opportunists who should have refused to act in his movies from the start.
