1957 Camille Laurens, (real name Laurence Ruel-Mézières) was born in Dijon on November 6. As an adolescent she wrote a diary and poems. She has said that her desire to become a writer arose in part from her love of reading.
After completing her Agrégation de Lettres she taught in Rouen.

In 1984 she left France for Morocco where she lived for twelve years, teaching for part of the time. Her first novel Index was published in 1991 by POL and she has remained with this publishing house ever since. Tragically in 1994, Laurens’ son died at birth. The text Philippe (1995) is a literary account of this loss; one that the author has stated helped her to deal with the profound sorrow she experienced. In 1995 her daughter was born. She now lives in Paris and continues to write In 2000 her novel Dans ces bras-là was awarded the Prix Femina and the Prix Renaudot Lycéen. Laurens also writes a regular column for L’Humanité. Called Le Grain des mots it reflects on the meanings and associations evoked by common French words and phrases.

Laurens' first four novels Index (1991), Romance (1992), Les Travaux d’Hercule (1994) and L’Avenir (1998) form a loose quartet which has been referred to as the ‘A-Z tetralogy’.1 As Sarah Capatanio notes, these texts are linked loosely in that all play with notions of genre and engendering, through deployment and deconstruction of ‘the detective story and the fictional erotic episode’.2 Crime and eroticism are linked in that several include references to a possible ‘crime passionel’, such as a young woman’s suspected murder of her lover in Romance.3 Yet, in Capitanio’s reading, these texts also overturn one of the central expectations that more conservative detective fiction, which ‘valorizes the infallible and exclusive power of the detective (historically male and the representation of society’s laws) to solve a murder (or other transgression)[…]and thus to establish order’.4 In Lauren’s texts crimes are not solved and gender roles and characters shift boundaries and dissolve into one another. One of the ways in which this ludism and subversion of convention is played out most distinctively across the novels is via the allocation of the name ‘Camille Laurens’, (and its variants) to a range of female and male personae. In Index, for example, this name is given to both the author of the book bought by Claire Desprez, (which appears to narrate her life secrets) and to an ageing, Latin-American tango teacher from Paris’s Latin Quarter.5
These early texts also reveal Lauren’s writing to be highly cinematic in construction. Not only do some scenes recall the terse and highly visual writing of film scripts, or centre around characters’ plans to make films, but questions of the gaze are also central. Slippages and reversals of role elicit questions about who is gazing at whom within what mesh of gender and power relations, pleasure and frustration. The writing also raises issues of who has the power to construct the frame of such encounters. This is apparent, for example in the construction of L’Avenir, which sees ‘Camille’s’ erotic encounters with her lover Jacques slide in and out of a framework of cinematic imagery. Chapter headings frame imagined lives as moments in a film-making process, ‘Panoramique’, ‘Remake’, ‘Scène (Première)’. Moreover, in the chapter entitled ‘Scène (Deuxième) the ‘Camille’ character tries to reframe her love affair with Jacques by passionately seducing his ‘alter-ego’, the actor who will play him in a film version of one of her novels.

Concerns of identity, sexuality and artistic construction are also explored in detail in Dans ces bras-là.. The main narrator of the text is a female author. In discussion with her [male] editor she asserts that the subject of her new novel is to be a woman, who is ‘pleine d’hommes';

J’écris un livre sur les hommes, un roman sur les hommes de ma vie – c’est que je dis quand on m’interroge. Sujet: l’homme.
La verité, la verité vrai, c’est que j’écris sur les hommes, pour les hommes, pour eux. L’écriture est le fil doit nous unir. Écrivant, je me signale à leur attention. Sujet: moi. Je suis pleine d’hommes. Voilà le sujet.6

Dans-ces bras-là takes the form of a series of monologues in which a first person female narrator speaks to a psychoanalyst. Over the course of the novel this voice is interwoven with third-person narration of episodes in ‘Camille’s’ life, and with the voices of other characters, such as ‘Le père’, ‘Le mari’, ‘La mère’ and ‘Le lecteur’.

Some critical readers have hailed this novel as a celebration of sexual difference and heterosexual desire, a joy nevertheless undercut by the difficulty of desire’s representation and the ultimate threat of separation. Jêrome Game has suggested, for instance, that it salutes ‘jouissance de la différence’ while also acknowledging ‘l'impossibilité en définitive, d'une communion pure et parfaite entre les êtres -a fortiori entre les sexes, les mots, et les choses.’7 The text’s main female narrator herself also claims at times that her project is to narrate her perception and experience of sexual difference’s relation to sexual desire. Without reducing difference to ‘Moi Tarzan, toi Jane’ her declared interest is ‘la différence des sexes’ and how ‘en étant pénetrée, on pénètre le mystère de l’autre’.8 Nevertheless, she acknowledges that this type of mutual, mysterious exploration is an ideal. At times desire in general can have a shocking grammar, ‘désirer un homme, désirer une femme, désirer un enfant: vous voyez que le grammaire peut être choquante, quelquefois, mais révélatrice aussi’.9 Indeed, beyond the elision of the desire for men and children, the text does explore desire’s sometimes shocking manifestations. The section entitled ‘l’homme du fantasme’, for example, depicts the various stages through which a manipulative, dominant male abusively moulds and subjugates an unnamed women into becoming the ultimate, abject sexual object. This section, however, is only one representation of desire among many variants in the text. At other times the narrator expresses a strong desire to explore ‘Le genre qu’elle n’a pas’ in ways that do not involve being conquered but being mutually absorbed in difference, ‘[a]voir l’homme en moi. Être dans l’homme. Qu’on ne voie pas la limite: qu’il n’y ait plus de limites’.10

This complex text is a clear exploration of female desire. Yet it includes a number of statements that go against the grain of some feminist frameworks for such an exploration, particularly those that enjoin female writers to celebrate women’s desires and subjectivities in relation to other women. For example when speaking of ‘la langue maternelle’ in analysis, the narrator promises that it will be heard, but also declares, ‘[m]ais le souhaitez-vous vraiment?[…]N’avez vous peur de l’amour des femmes?’.11 Elsewhere she reflects, 'Je sais ce que vous allez dire: et les femmes? Les autres femmes? La mère, la soeur, l’amie…n’ont-elles pas autants de poids dans la vie, sinon davantage. Ne comptent-elles pas? Elles ne compteraient pas. Pas dans cette histoire. Ou très peu'.12 The novel also often represents and celebrates a woman made in the image of men – the narrator as constructed in relation to her father, grandfather, lovers, husband and editor, ‘[l]es hommes seraient ce jour autour d’elle, ce qui la rend visible, ce qui la crée, peut-être’.13

Laurens has been criticized by some readers for appearing to devalue the relationships with the women in her own life, particularly her mother. She defends herself by arguing that the narrator should not be confused with the author, indicating that the text is informed by stories other than the narrator’s, including the mother’s tale that is also woven into it.14 This tale also sometimes provides a counterpoint to the narrator’s validation of men, showing, for example, a cruel side to the beloved father.

In speaking of her use of autofiction in general, Laurens states although ‘Quand on écrit, on ne parle que de soi, même si l’on écrit un roman qui se passe au Japon du XIIe siècle.’15, yet she also stresses that writing is neither simple personal revelation nor therapy. It is always a form of reconstruction, the personae of the stories always wear ‘masques et voiles’, and are informed by ‘biographies imaginaires’ even when their experiences parallel some of the author’s.16 Laurens identifies Philippe (1995) as being the most directly autobiographical work of her oeuvre, also stating that it is here that she explores her own ‘langue maternelle’ in the face of the loss of her son at birth.17

It is also interesting to consider how references to cinema and the construction of the gaze also inform Dans ces bras-là. In some cases references that make scenes consciously cinematic may act as a distancing device, heightening the sense that the characters’ identities are constructed. At one point the narrator says, for example, of ‘le mari’, ‘Il était dans l’existence comme dans un film qu’on tournerait au fur et à mesure, en improvisant’. ‘[I]l était Johnny Weissmuller […]Errol Flynn […] Rhett Butler’.18

In another sense the novel can be thought of as cinematic in that it appears to engage with a larger project in which men are constructed in relation to a desiring female gaze. The narrator delights in the aesthetics of men’s bodies, ‘Ce que j’aime le plus chez les hommes, physiquement, ce sont les épaules, la ligne que va du cou à l’articulation de les bras, les bras, la poitrine, le dos’.19 As an adult woman she tries to act on her desires. The novel opens with her following home a man she wishes to seduce. This man will later become her analyst, the main audience for the accounts of her relationships to other men. Yet the project of delineating men as seen by the narrator remains problematic. Sometimes they are reduced to a list of attributes ‘[l]a voix, la taille, la pointure, les poils, la tache, la pomme d’Adam, la verge, les testicules…’.20 This fails to capture complexity, something the narrator acknowledges when she lists her father’s sayings, then on re-reading them decides that they have failed to capture him and exclaims ‘[à] quoi se reduit son être, soudain!’21 Yet, at times, between the infidelities, disappointments and the objectifications of each sex by the other that the text touches on, there is a sense that it is probing for a language of heterosexual desire constructed from a female perspective. This is a difficult, perhaps impossible task, given men’s historical domination of language and the problematics of female subjects’ entry into language. Indeed the narrator herself declares that her first three texts were written in the Father’s language, ‘quand elle écrit, il règne, elle écrit dans sa langue, la langue paternelle’.22 Yet within a text that plays with the idea of men creating women and women creating men, according to their own desires, there are reminders that as a literary creator a female writer still retains something of a privileged position. Being at one remove from the network of relationships within the text, (even when these include autofictional episodes) the writer is able to at least try to represent the desires and desirability of male characters as well as female characters. In Dans ces bras-là the fictional author ‘Camille’ describes the recognition of her putative power to form both texts and men as a key stage in her emergence as a writer. As she writes a journal of her first sexual experience, she senses the powerful potential fusion of sex and text as reconstructed by a female subject. She declares ‘[e]nfin elle ne se borne plus `a vivre sa vie, elle la recrée, elle la formule, elle l’invente. Pour la première fois, elle aime et elle écrit. Entre ses mains il y a un homme et un livre. C’est la première fois’.23 The paratextual author Camille Laurens also expresses delight in a similar process. In interview with Xavier Person, she declares ‘[e]n écrivant les hommes, je les rêve et je les recrée. Les mots, eux, me servent à rêver ma vie, à la refaire, à la redire. Les deux démarches sont comparables’.24

Laurens’ most recent novel L’Amour: roman is a reflection on the different ways in which one inherits and builds knowledge and experiences of varied forms of love. It has been described as rendering ‘les multiples facettes du sentiment amoureux’, in ways that range from violent to gentle, comic to tragic’.25

1 Sarah Capitanio, ‘Authorial inscription in the novels of Camille Laurens’, Romance Studies (20) 2 (June 2002), p.6. As Capitanio also notes the novels in the tetralogy are not Lauren’s first four published texts. Philippe, which deals with the death of a child was published in 1995.
2Capitanio, Op. Cit., p. 7.
3 Camille Laurens, Romance (Paris: POL, 1992), p. 249.
4 Capitanio, Op. Cit., p. 7.
5 Capitanio, Op. Cit., p. 9. See also p. 10 for a consideration of this phenomenon in other novels.
6 Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-la (Paris: POL, 2000), p. 182.
7 Jêrome Game, Camille Laurens: Dans ces bras-là: Lecture. Available online at <http://www.inventaire-invention.com/lectures/game_laurens.htm>.
8 Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-là (Paris: POL, 2000), p. 184, p. 131.
9 Ibid, p. 232.
10 Ibid, p. 145.
11 Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-là (Paris: POL, 2000), p. 123.
12 Ibid, p. 15.
13 Ibid, p. 15.
14 See Xavier Person’s interview of Laurens for fnac for further consideration of this issue. Available online at < http://www.fnac.net/le_cafe_litteraire_2001/html/camille_laurens_interview.html>.
15 Ibid.
16 Interview on Radio Canada (November 2000) Available online at <http://radio-canada.ca/cyberpresse/2000/Contenu.asp?DateMois=11&section=Novembre>.
17 Ibid.
18 Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-là (Paris: POL, 2000), pp. 157-158.
19Ibid, p. 48.
20 Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-là (Paris: POL, 2000), p.40.
21 Ibid, p. 118.
22 Ibid, p. 122.
23 Camille Laurens, Dans ces bras-la (Paris: POL, 2000), p.88.
24 Laurens, quoted in interview with Xavier Person. Available online at < http://www.fnac.net/le_cafe_litteraire_2001/html/camille_laurens_interview.html>.
25 Marie-Laure Delorme, Journal du Dimanche (March 2, 2003).

Index (Paris: POL, 1991).

Romance (Paris: POL, 1992).

Les Travaux d’Hercule (Paris: POL, 1994).

Philippe (Paris: POL, 1995).

L’Avenir (Paris: POL, 1998).

Quelques-un (Paris: POL, 1999).

Dans ces bras-là (Paris: POL, 2000).

Le Grain des mots (Paris: POL, 2003).

L’Amour: roman (Paris: POL, 2003).

Cet absent-là (Editions Léo Scheer, 2004)

Ni toi ni moi (Paris: P.O.L/, 2006).

In Those Arms (Dans ces bras-là) trans. Ian Monk (London: Bloomsbury, 2003).

Defromont, Jean-Luc, Interview with Camille Laurens in Le jeu des arts, ed. Le Groupe de Recherche sur l'Extreme Contemporain (GREC),(Bari, B.A. Graphis, 2005). [Reunit les actes du colloque 'L'ecriture francaise contemporaine: entre roman et art", organise a Bari en octobre 2003].

Guichard, Thierry, ‘Dans ces bras-là’, La Matricule des Anges, 032 (September –November 2000). Available online at <http://www.lmda.net/din/tit_lmda.php?Id=8535>.

Nicolas, Alain, ‘Le sexe opposé', L’Humanité (7 September 2000), 20.

– ‘Camille Laurens et ses “Travaux d’Hercules”’, L’Humanité (23 September, 1994), 20-21.

Person, Xavier ‘Interview: Camille Laurens’, fnac.net/le café littéraire (2000).
Available online at < http://www.fnac.net/le_cafe_litteraire_2001/html/camille_laurens_interview.html>.

Savary, Philippe, 'La peau et le masque', La Matricule des Anges (May-March 2003) [dossier on Camille Laurens], 18-23.

Interview on Radio Canada (November 2000) Available online at <http://radio-canada.ca/cyberpresse/2000/Contenu.asp?DateMois=11&section=Novembre>.

Capitanio, Sarah, ‘Authorial inscription in the novels of Camille Laurens’, Romance Studies (20)2 (June 2002), 5-16.

— 'From Romance to L'Amour, roman: Camille Laurens's rewriting of the family novel', The Modern Language Review 100.1 (January 2005), 68-77.

Delorme, Marie-Laure ‘L’amour: un roman’, Journal du Dimanche (March 2, 2003).

Game, Jêrome Camille Laurens: Dans ces bras-là: Lecture. Available online at <http://www.inventaire-invention.com/lectures/game_laurens.htm>.

Holmes, Diana, 'The return to romance: love stories in recent French women's writing', L'Esprit Createur (special issue: 'A New Generation: Sex, Gender and Creativity in Contemporary Women's Writing in French', ed. Gill Rye) (Spring 2005).

Poisson, Catherine 'Frictions : mot et image chez Marie NDiaye et Camille Laurens', Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 11.4 (October 2007), pp. 489-96

Rye,Gill 'Registering trauma: the body in childbirth in contemporary French women's writing', Nottingham French Studies 45.3 (Autumn 2006).

—'Family tragedies: child death in recent French literature', in Affaires de famille: The Family in Contemporary French Culture and Theory, ed. Marie-Claire Barnet and Edward Welch (Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2007), pp.267-81.

Savary, Philippe, 'Camille Laurens, un secret sous la langue', La Matricule des Anges (May-March 2003) [dossier on Camille Laurens], 14-17.

‘Dans ces bras-là’<http://www.lmda.net/din/tit_lmda.php?Id=8535> Review by Thierry Guichard for La Matricule des Anges, 032 (September –November 2000).

Dans ces bras-là: Lecture <http://www.inventaire-invention.com/lectures/game_laurens.htm> Critical reading of the text by Jêrome Game.

Interview <http://radio-canada.ca/cyberpresse/2000/Contenu.asp?DateMois=11&section=Novembre> Interview on Radio Canada (November 2000) .

Interview: Camille Laurens < http://www.fnac.net/le_cafe_litteraire_2001/html/camille_laurens_interview.html>fnac.net/le café littéraire>Interview by Xavier Person for fnac: le café littéraire (2000).

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