Best-known in the English-speaking world for her 1992 debut The Governesses, a frenzied modern-day conte of female appetite translated in 2018, the French writer Anne Serre says she has little time for the vogue of fictionalised autobiography. ‘It’s not enough to write in your own voice, come to the page with what you have to say, and call it a novel’, she has argued. ‘The whole point of a novel should be that we don’t know who is speaking’. In a mannered, highly controlled style – her surname resembles the verb serrer, to ‘tighten, wrench or clamp’ – Serre has spent her career troubling the boundaries between author and narrator, fact and fiction, realism and fantasy.
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