Hewitt…breaks new ground [in examining] the lives and selected writings of five major contemporary French women writers: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Conde. Part literary criticism and part biography, this book seeks mainly to shed light on how these writers’ works illustrate the fine line that separates fact from fiction. The author’s main thesis, which she persuasively and lucidly defends, is that each of these women reveals in her autobiographical writings the need for a fictional self…Hewitt also reinterprets her subjects’ writings, including their fiction, from a feminist postmodernist standpoint and shows the cross-linkages that exist among these writers despite stylistic differences. A valuable addition to any library. –Booklist.
Hewitt’s treatment of the issue of gendered identity in autobiography is both informed and intelligent…Her book is staged as a fascinating and vital dialogue among these important writers. –Choice.
One cannot read the book without becoming engaged in [Hewitt’s] search for a truth that shuns simple answers.It is to her credit that she tries to walk her own tightropes with honesty and clarity over the complexities of autobiography, gender, critical approaches to reading, authors’ lives and the French and English language. She too is a successful acrobat. –Women’s Review of Books. Leah D. Hewitt is an associate professor of French at Amherst College.