Marguerite Duras was one of 20th century France's most influential and complex figures, a phenomenally productive and daring writer and film maker, a passionate political activist, and a charismatic and infuriating friend and lover. Duras drew constantly on her own experience in her art, often blurring the boundaries between the two.
Duras spent her childhood in French colonial Indo-China, and its landscapes, lights and smells always were to haunt her. Her unhappy early years - fraught relations with her mother, the cruelty of her older brother, and her sordid relationship as a teenager with a rich Chinese - were to reverberate in one form or another through most of her work, most famously in her Goncourt-prize-winning novel 'The Lover'.
At eighteen Duras moved to Paris, then St-Germain-des-Pres, where she lived for the rest of her life. Here she lived with husband Robert Antelme, lover Dionys Mascolo, then in later life Yann Andrea, a homosexual forty years her junior; raised her son Outa; hid Francois Mitterand during the Resistance; cooked delicious Vietnamese stews; and became one of the leading writers and commentators of post-war Paris.
This biography, never flinching from the unpleasant and contradictory aspects of Duras' character - her work for the occupying forces during the war, her alcoholism and increasing narcissism in later life - conveys her extraordinary creative energy, bravery and sensuality.
Winner of Prix Femina.
