Credit: JFPaga-éditionsGrasset.

In this series of interviews, I will be talking to memoirists, both published and working towards publication, about their writing process, and how writing memoir has helped them better understand themselves and their place in the world. I am also interested in how a writer navigates difficult territory for themselves and those they love. As well as featuring the interviews here on my blog site, I will be using them as research for my upcoming publication, INTO BEING: The Radical Craft of Memoir and its Power to Transform (published by MUP in 2025)

My sixth interviewee is Vanessa Springora, who came to my attention a couple of years ago with the UK publication of her bestselling memoir, Le Consentement (Consent), about a relationship she had when she was just turning 14 with a famous French writer, known as G, who was about 50 at the time. The subject matter was close to my heart, as I too had had a relationship with an older man when I was a child, and the long term effects that Springora wrote about resonated deeply with me. I read Springora’s memoir in one sitting, but I was also so in awe of the power of literature to make change: her predator was soon exposed as Gabriel Matzneff, and an investigation into his multiple acts of abuse, and peadophila, was opened. Other allegations happened in France around this time, all involving high profile and powerful men, which led to French Parliament, in April 2021, unanimously passing a bill setting the age of consent at 15. I wrote about this for Aeon magazine, how rife sexual abuse of minors was in certain bohemian circles in the 1980s, and you can read my essay here. I am thrilled that Vanessa Springora agreed to be interviewed by me. Consent is a beautiful heartbreaking and courageous book. It has also been made into a film, directed by Vanessa Filho, which was released last month in France on (11th October 2023)..

Vanessa Springora is a French writer and a freelance publisher. In January 2020, she published Le Consentement (Consent). According to The Guardian, her book, translated in over thirty countries and adapted for the stage and the cinema in 2023, ‘sparked an international furor’.

When and how did you realize you had to write Le Consentement?

It’s a book I had been carrying around with me for thirty years, but I only started writing a first draft in 2014. Before that, I was too afraid of the repercussions on my personal and professional life to have the courage to write it. That first version I wrote in a very different form to the current one, it was a more romanticized version that didn’t satisfy me at all, a kind of rewrite of Nabokov’s novel Lolita, but from the victim’s point of view.  This version was far too distanced, too far from reality, so I let it sleep in my computer and came back to it in early 2017. That’s when I felt I’d found the right tone, this time expressing myself in the first person, in my own name, without hiding behind a fictional character.

Did it feel essential that you do it? Was the need urgent? Persistent?

The first real trigger was observing the teenagers around me, first my step-daughter, then my son, who, through no fault of my own, turned 14 just as my book came out. It was an incredible upheaval. Because through your own children, you relive a part of your own youth. And as I watched them grow up, I realized first what an adolescent is: someone in the throes of change, who generally doesn’t like himself, but paradoxically has an extreme need to please, a terrible desire to skip stages and become an adult straight away, and a terrible fear of doing so. I saw how they were still big children, so naive, sensitive, and vulnerable. Which makes them ideal prey. And I realized that I wouldn’t stand for an adult using any form of authority, fame, power, or talent, to take advantage of them, to appropriate their bodies, to make them objects of pleasure. The urge to write grew inside me to explain what I had experienced and to protect them. In 2017, #MeToo had gone a little over my head, but there was a news item in France that revolted me. The mother of an eleven-year-old girl who had been abused by an adult had filed a complaint for rape, but even though there had been penetration, the rape was requalified as a simple sexual assault because the child was supposedly “consenting”. I told myself that this concept of “consent” only served to clear the criminals, never to protect the victims.

There was another trigger: in 2013, Gabriel Matzneff, the author whose actions I denounce in Le Consentement, was awarded the Prix Renaudot, a major French literary prize, without arousing the slightest indignation in the publishing world where I work. I saw it as a kind of denial, which I felt was both bruising and provocative. I also said to myself that nothing had changed since the 80s, and that made me very angry.

And then the final trigger was the fact that my abuser continued to harass me, writing to me at every turn, contacting the literary director I was working with to convince her to put us in touch, even though I hadn’t written back to him in thirty years. He was emotionally blackmailing me, saying he was dying, and I couldn’t take it anymore! I had to stop him.

What is it about memoir that appeals to you?

In France, we have a long tradition of autobiographical literature. From Montaigne to Rousseau, right up to Proust, of course. I like novels, but I’ve always had a particular attraction for autobiographical accounts, the literature of reality, and what is now called in France “autofiction”. One of my favorite books is the diary written by Marguerite Duras during the Occupation, entitled La Douleur (The Pain). In it, she recounts her husband’s return from the concentration camps, when she had fallen in love with another man. It’s an extraordinary book. Not only does she record very intimate feelings from day to day, but she also bears witness to an era and to her activities as a member of the Resistance. With the desire to record an individual story like a self-historian, to keep a trace of it. Autobiographical accounts are often a literature of survival, and more authentic than the novel. Above all, it’s about putting into words what is unspeakable. From a literary point of view, it’s necessarily fascinating.

Did your narrative voice come naturally, and your authority as the person telling this story, or was that something you needed to work on – did it come more easily the deeper you went into writing the book and your research?

It’s obviously something I had to work on, and something that gave me a hard time. Writing in the first person and in the present tense was very important. It enabled me to stay as close as possible to my emotions at the time. But I also tried to strike a balance with my retrospective view, which is the one I have today as an adult, of this episode in my life. It’s true that I found the right tone as I went along, always navigating from the past to the present.

And how did you navigate writing about family members or those who are close to you?

That’s obviously the most difficult part. I was very reserved when it came to talking about my mother, my partner, or my son. But my mother is a central character in the book, even if I don’t talk about her much in the end, because she has a responsibility in this affair. I’ve tried to avoid settling scores, to tell things in a neutral, factual way, without animosity. In fact, she was grateful to me for this, as she never asked me to change anything I had written about her. Sometimes it was the journalists who used terribly accusatory words to describe her after reading my book, whereas I had weighed up every word so as never to be judgmental.

Did you share the text with relevant people before it went to press? Did you give them veto as to what was kept?

I only gave that privilege to my mother, because I think she deeply regrets not having protected me at the time. So, she read the text on proof and didn’t touch a line. My aim was not to take revenge on anything. Not even my predator. He, on the other hand, only had access to the text when it was published. Legally, there was no risk of him being recognizable, since he had already told our story in his own books. So, he’d already confessed to everything! He says he hasn’t read Le Consentement, but he must have, because he wrote a kind of right of reply that no publisher wanted to publish. The text was self-published. My partner was my first reader, because he’s the one who pushed me to write this book. But I write very little about him.

Were there aspects of your story that you resisted, that you thought you could get away with not writing, but then realised it wasn’t possible – and if so, how did you protect yourself, or how did it feel to write those sections?

The most difficult passages to write were those concerning the sexual abuse I suffered as a teenager and its repercussions on my sexuality as a woman. Despite a few passages, as a rule I only depicted these scenes in small, allusive touches. But I couldn’t completely conceal reality and at times I had to use crude words and describe scenes of great intimacy, which went against my natural modesty. I regret that I didn’t go further in the description, that I didn’t delve deeper into this aspect of the relationship, on which lies a large part of the hold I’m denouncing. But there’s nothing more difficult than writing about intimacy, and sex. Especially when you’ve suffered violence.

Was it a process to become ‘ready’ or ‘prepared’ to go to the places that you might have otherwise resisted?

That’s a very interesting question. I believe that writing, the search for the right word, the most accurate word, is a way of revisiting experiences but at the same time putting them at a distance. Once things have been named, they are often deactivated, their harmfulness cancelled out. When we’ve experienced violence, we’re often invaded by uncontrollable images. Putting them into words is a way of keeping them at bay, of neutralizing them.

Did you have any rituals to protect yourself?

Unfortunately, I haven’t found any. I have to say that I cried a lot while writing. And to this day, I can’t reread certain pages of my book without being in tears. I remember a reading I had to do in public in Norway. People had paid to come and see me, but I couldn’t get past the second paragraph of the extract the organizers had chosen. These were the most violent pages, the hardest for me. I told people that I was sorry, but that it was beyond my strength. And I cried with them in silence. They understood very well. I wish I had a ritual that allowed me to harden at will, on command. But I don’t think that exists.

Do you think personal narrative is a platform for exploring the unspeakable? Or even the unthinkable? If so, please expand:

Yes, I’m absolutely convinced of that, as I said above when talking about Marguerite Duras’s book La Douleur. But I could quote many other autobiographic stories of a testimonial nature, whose strength lies in confronting us with horror, the unspeakable and the unthinkable. I’m thinking of Primo Lévi’s Si c’est un homme, Alexei Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, or Robert Antelme’s L’Espèce humaine. No one could understand the concentration camp experience until they had read these fundamental texts written “from the inside”, by people who had experienced it first-hand. These individual testimonies have become universal.

How is memoir different from lived experience?

These two things are linked, but they don’t have the same temporality. Lived experience is immediate, it’s never thought about now you experience it. Life is a flow of events, sensations and emotions that is continuous in time, but can be very fragmented from a psychic point of view. We can quickly repress a traumatic episode that has just happened to us, only to see it resurface years later on the occasion of another seemingly unrelated event. Writing forces you to restore order to this chaos, this confused magma of lived experience. Autobiographical writing is retrospective; even when you’re writing a simple day-to-day diary, it’s always about looking back at yourself.  What’s more, to look back on one’s life, or on a particular moment in one’s life, is in a way to make it exist outside oneself, for oneself as well as for others. It forces us to extract events from silence, to analyse them, to recognise their effect on us, the way they have passed through us. Self-writing is a reflexive movement.

Do you write a journal and if so, how did that help when it came to writing your memoir?

No, I haven’t kept a diary since I was a teenager, and I regret it. It’s a form of writing that I was perhaps mistakenly disgusted by because of the diaries published by Gabriel Matzneff, in which he described what he called amorous conquests that were rapes and sexual abuse of minors.  These diaries were published with impunity for almost forty years. But I should probably get back to it. I found some notebooks in which I wrote my own diary when I was a teenager, and they helped me a lot in writing Le Consentement. I believe that the daily exercise of writing about oneself can be very beneficial, whether you’re a writer or not.

Does writing memoir offer cohesion to otherwise fractured memories and experience, and is that cohesion empowering? If so, expand on why?

This is a very interesting question, because it already shows that the work of writing, whether in fiction or reality, is always a recomposition. I spoke earlier of “restoring order to chaos”, and I think this is one of the missions of literature in general. But when it comes to autobiographical writing, it’s even truer. For my part, when I wrote Le Consentement, it was a question of reappropriating my own story, which up until then had only been told through the pen of my predator. It was also a way, not more empowering, but more equitable, more just, of regaining power through words over a part of my youth that I’d somehow been dispossessed of.

And did your recalling of memories lead to more memories that had been buried?

Absolutely, in this sense, writing is not far removed from psychoanalytical work. In both cases, we proceed by associating words and ideas. And this often allows repressed memories to resurface. I didn’t necessarily use these memories as literary material, but they were useful to me on a personal level. They were often linked to my early childhood and the discovery of sexuality in general. 

Do you think memoir has the power to change lives, both that of the writer and that of the reader?

Yes and no. I’ve often said that I don’t believe much in the therapeutic power of literature. Let me explain. After my book was published, people often said to me: “So, you’re feeling better now!” As if the simple fact of having made this story public was enough to erase the consequences on my life. It doesn’t work that way. You need to have done some psychological work on yourself, or at least have some distance, to be able to touch others and make your own experience universal. What can really change your life and heal your wounds, however, is to see that your book is useful to others, that other people recognise themselves in it, and thank you for helping them to see more clearly in their own lives. That’s so gratifying that it feels really good.

How has writing Le Consentement changed your life?

As I said earlier, writing this book has above all enabled me to right an injustice. On an individual level, it enabled me to tell my truth, to put forward a counter-narrative that opposed the idyllic version Matzneff gave in his books of the abuse he inflicted on his victims, and on me. This enabled me to take justice into my own hands in a way other than through the law, since the statute of limitations on sexual crimes did not allow me to lodge a complaint retroactively. It was a symbolic act of reparation in the face of a predator with a particular style since he had set up a highly sophisticated system of circular predation. He seduced schoolgirls with his notoriety as a writer, but these schoolgirls were then used as literary material to fuel his notoriety through scandal. So, since his books had dispossessed me of my own history, it was only right that it should be a book, my own, that would give me a voice and enable me to reclaim that history. To restore a piece of truth, my own.

From a symbolic point of view, it was very important for me to be heard, to be read, to be believed and to be understood. And to feel alone no longer.

What’s more, it also made me want to continue writing, which is what I’m doing now. I’ve realised that, even if writing isn’t a pleasure every day, even if it’s sometimes very painful, it’s an activity I enjoy enormously. In fact, I’m interested in all forms of writing.

When we write memoir, we make something that is otherwise in flux concrete – this can be good and bad, good in that you might become a master of your story, and bad perhaps in that it sets it in stone and it becomes a reality, rather than something that was fleeting or forgotten. What are your views on this?

That’s a very interesting question too, because some authors spend their writing lives revisiting the same (often traumatic) events, reshaping them repeatedly. I’m thinking of Annie Ernaux or Edouard Louis or Thomas Bernhard, for instance. You can have a certain approach to an event at a given point in your life and change the way you look at things a decade later. OR you may want to delve deeper into an episode you’ve only touched on in another text. In my opinion, nothing is ever set in stone. Thanks to autobiographical writings, you can always clarify, go back, and even say that you made a mistake, why not.