Françoise Sagan

French · 1935 to 2004

Born Françoise Delphine Quoirez on June 21, 1935, in Cajarc, a small market town in the limestone country of the Lot, the youngest child of a company director and a landowner's daughter, she was nicknamed Kiki and spent her early childhood among the animals on the family land before the war drove the household into the Vercors. She was expelled from one convent school for lack of deep spirituality and from another for hanging a bust of Molière from the chapel rafters with a piece of string. She failed her baccalauréat the first time, scraped through the second, and flunked out of the Sorbonne in her first year, having spent most of it in the cafés of the Boulevard Saint-Germain. She took the pen name Sagan from a Proust character and at eighteen wrote Bonjour Tristesse (1954) in six weeks during the summer holiday between her two attempts at first-year exams. The novella, narrated by seventeen-year-old Cécile on the Côte d'Azur as she schemes against her widowed father's new fiancée, sold five million copies in eighteen months. François Mauriac, reviewing it on the front page of Le Figaro, called her a charming little monster. She drove an Aston Martin into a ditch near Paris in 1957, lay in a coma for several days, emerged addicted to opiates, and wrote about the addiction in Toxique (1964). She signed the Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian war and survived a retaliatory OAS bomb at her parents' home in 1961. She died of a pulmonary embolism in Honfleur, Normandy, on September 24, 2004, at sixty-nine, and was buried at Seuzac beside her beloved Cajarc.