Françoise Sagan

Carine Roitfeld's favorite book is Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), the first novel by French author Françoise Sagan who was dubbed "the Bardot of literature." Bonjour Tristesse was published in French in 1954 and tells the coming-of-age story of a sophisticated seventeen-year-old girl, Cecile, her hedonistic widowed father, and the women in his life. This powerful novel, at once sympathetic and unsparing, was an instant scandal upon publication as well as an international bestseller that was made into a movie. Not bad for a seventeen-year-old author that wrote the entire manuscript in 32 days! Read an interview with Sagan conducted by The Paris Review in the autumn of 1956, her views on everything are quite amusing, particularly her success.

Françoise Sagan photographs © 1955 Life Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
Françoise Sagan photograph © 1956 Jeanloup Sieff. All Rights Reserved.

Comments

[Robert Nguyen]

I have read a book and liked it so much.