The Margot Affair: A Novel

We had Madame Roullé in physics-chemistry again, who liked to return our tests in ascending order, from the worst grades to the best. Those who got lower than ten out of twenty had their tests thrown onto their desks. The others were handed theirs lovingly. It was almost impossible to get above fifteen in her class. She liked to tell us our work wa

Such was the nature of hope—believing that change wasn’t swift and dramatic, that certain routines were immutable.

Madame Lapierre came from an upper-class, highly educated family. For her entire life she had lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to Passy, and I struggled to picture Father in those spaces. I imagined him sitting on the edge of a leather couch, or always staring out of a window, wanting to be elsewhere. I was relieved he wasn’t from Paris

But what you may not know about my father is that he never really took a day off, not for his wife and sons and not for us. He believed in the value of work. Even during holidays, he was attached to his phone, reviewed papers after everyone had gone to bed. Because he felt this enormous responsibility to take care of us all. He was afraid. What if

I lived in a strange space, caught between the guilt of being his weakness and the desire to be everything.

You have an extraordinary mother, Father often said, as though she was better than all the others. A mother is not a friend, Anouk liked to say, proud of this distinction. What happened to daughters like us? Would we flee our families, wanting to be far away, wishing to carve out a life that was ours alone, far removed from where we came from? Or w

Because you experience the world differently at your age. Your family, this upheaval with your father, is everything to you. You haven’t been in love yet, have you? Your world is still contained, small and intense, and every change to the status quo feels like a rug is being pulled from under your feet. It knocks the air from you. I can see it on y

Her favorite was Trouble Every Day, the only horror film Claire Denis ever made, in which an American man goes to Paris with his wife for their honeymoon. But the trip has a darker purpose.

This was not the story of François Mitterrand, once president of France, and his hidden daughter, Mazarine. I knew better than to imagine the grandeur of a president. Mitterrand had split his holidays between both families, the women and children stood together at his funeral, whereas Father’s worlds existed on parallel planes, never intersecting.