Violette Leduc does not try to please; she doesn't please; in fact, she alarms people…. Leafing through [her books] you glimpse a world full of sound and fury, where love often bears the name of hate, where a passion for life bursts forth in cries of despair; a world laid waste by loneliness which, seen from afar, looks arid. It is not in fact. (pp. v-vi)

[In La Bâtarde, Violette Leduc's autobiography, she is a] schoolgirl of fifty-five … writing down words in an exercise book. And sometimes, when her memories do not suffice to illumine her emotions, she whirls us off into strange flights of fancy; she exorcises the absence that tortures her with violent and lyrical phantasmagoria. Under its real-life covering, the dream life shows through, running like filigree through stories of the utmost simplicity.

She is her own principal heroine. But her protagonists exist intensely...