The Sexual Life of Catherine M.

Book Overview

La vie sexuelle de Catherine M. appeared in France in April 2001 and was translated into English by Adriana Hunter the following year. Its author was, at the time of publication, the fifty-three-year-old editor of Art Press, a respected figure in the Parisian contemporary-art establishment — a curator of biennales, a critic of painting and sculpture, a professional viewer. The book records, in first-person prose as dry as a museum wall text, four decades of her participation in group sex, orgies, and anonymous encounters in Paris. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, was denounced, defended, and imitated, and remains the landmark of a specific strain of French confessional writing — the kind that offers neither eroticism nor apology, only inventory.

The book is divided into four parts, each a different optic on the same material. Numbers opens with a childhood scene of counting and moves through her earliest group encounters — the Lyon garden, the clap she calls her “baptism,” Victor’s stucco grotto, Chez Aimé, the Bois de Boulogne, the car-park cortèges at porte de Saint-Cloud — and lands on the architecture of her solitary fantasy life. Space maps the geography of these encounters: the ring road, the gates of Paris, outdoor sex on vineyard tracks and stadium terraces, the brief and unprolific erotic life of her professional travel. Confined Space turns inward to vans, truck cabs, train couchettes, peep-show kiosks, stairwells, offices, bathrooms — and, in its hardest sections, to illness, dirt, vomit, and the precise taboos that a woman with “no taboos” actually keeps. Details ends the book by zooming in to the body part by part: the mouth as instrument, the arse as organ of identity, the mechanics of her own orgasm, and the closing sequence in which she watches herself on film and discovers that the arousal of being seen seeing herself is the one that all the others have been approximating.

What makes the book singular is the register. Millet refuses both titillation and self-exposure in the Anglo-American confessional sense. She writes as if she were cataloguing someone else’s collection — with patience, with taxonomic pleasure, with the professional calm of a person whose working life is looking at objects and then describing them. Her reference points are Barnett Newman, Yves Klein, and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, not Story of O (though she knows it). Catholicism is treated as architecture, not guilt. Sex is treated as geography, not transgression. The long winding sentences accumulate detail without crescendo; every few pages a sudden image breaks through — the body as museum boardgame under an overhead light, the concrete bench’s elastic copse of watchers, the rocks that look like the backs of hippopotamuses, the sheet of paper rising in a draught — and then the analytical voice resumes.

This deep summary preserves that voice. The ten blocks below are stitched from parallel readings of each section by a set of chapter agents, all briefed to stay out of the author’s way. The connective prose steps back; Millet’s own passages — many of them — do the work. The excerpts are generous because the book’s texture is the excerpts. Read as a curated anthology with wall text: you should hear her voice constantly, and the paragraphs between the blockquotes exist only to place, connect, and illuminate.

A warning, not an apology: the content is explicit throughout. Millet writes about bodies the way she writes about paintings — close, specific, unflinching. If you want a memoir that apologises for what it describes, or one that sensationalises it, this isn’t that book, and this isn’t that summary.

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Block 1: Numbers — First Countings, First Orgies

The book opens with a child doing arithmetic in the dark. Millet, aged three or four, lying in the largest room of a new apartment, stares at the strip of kitchen light across the corridor and cannot fall asleep until she has worked through that evening’s figures. The problems are specific. How many husbands could a woman have? At once or one after another? Was five or six a decent number, or was the right answer “countless”? Children eventually replace husbands as the operand — six again, maybe more, with proper spacing and a considered ratio of girls to boys. Running in parallel, a third ledger: a devotional accounting kept for God, in which she mentally serves him dinner every night and frets over the size of the portions and the rate at which the water is poured.

She presents these rituals without any wink. The Catholic and the sexual arithmetic share the same mental furniture — a child trying to fix the number of things the adult world will one day require her to manage. Her theological confusion about the Trinity (the plaster baby in the crib, the suffering man on the cross, the ghost called the Holy Spirit, Mary sometimes mother and sometimes daughter) is of a piece with her confusion about husbands. Multiplicity is the given; enumeration is the only way to think about it. She eventually takes her problem to the parish priest:

I wanted to become a nun, to be a ‘bride of Christ’, and to become a missionary in an Africa seething with destitute peoples, but I also wanted to have husbands and children. The priest was a laconic man, and he cut short the conversation, believing that my concerns were premature.

The Lyon garden

By the time she loses her virginity at eighteen, she has already stopped counting. Within weeks of being deflowered she is in a garden on a hill above Lyon with three boys and another girl — André, who drove her down from Paris and stroked her as she squatted to pee on the roadside; his friend Ringo; a quieter, shyer boy; and a lanky tomboy with short coarse hair. Millet reports this first group scene the way a curator reports provenance. The lunch, the heat, the suggestion of jumping in the pond, her T-shirt already half over her head as she hears André say his girlfriend won’t be bashful in coming forwards. No one actually gets in the pond — the garden is exposed — and the next image is interior:

in any event, the next set of images that come back to me are in a bedroom, me nestled in a tall, cast iron bed, all I can see through the metal bars are the brightly lit walls, aware of the other girl lying on a divan in one corner of the room.

She distinguishes each boy by body and by cock. André fucks her first, “quite slowly and calmly as was his manner,” then walks away, back arched, toward the tomboy; Ringo takes his place, “one of those men who isolate the action of the pelvis from the rest of the body, who hammer without smothering”; the shy one strokes her upper body on one elbow and waits his turn. She has to get up to pee; when she comes back the shy boy is with the other girl, and someone — André or Ringo — thoughtfully reassures her that he had only gone over to “finish off.”

Already her signature preoccupation is in place: the taxonomy of flesh. Circumcised versus uncircumcised, the “smooth monolithic contours” of a glans that is always exposed versus the foreskin that “you can play back and forth, uncovering the glans like a great bubble forming on the surface of soapy water.” Bodies get sorted by muscle tone, by hairiness, by complexion; she notices that she becomes “more submissive with the clean cut or slightly rugged bodies that I perceived as truly male, whereas I took more initiative with heavier bodies that I feminised.” None of it is breathless. It is comparative anatomy, performed in real time.

The ghost train and the clap

She closes the Lyon chapter with a metaphor for her own entry into all of this, and it is typical of her — deflationary, slightly comic, a touch folkloric:

In short, I entered my adult sexual life in the same way that, as a child, I went into the tunnel on the ghost train, blindly and for the pleasure of being jostled about and grabbed as chance would have it. Or, you could say, swallowed up by it as a frog is by a snake.

A few days after returning to Paris, André writes a tactful letter warning that everyone has the clap. Her mother opens the envelope. She is sent to the doctor and grounded. Her “own sense of propriety, which had become extremely intransigent,” no longer tolerates living with parents who can now picture her having sex. She runs away, is brought back, runs away again, and goes to live with Claude. “The clap had been my baptism.” For years afterward she lives in “mortal terror of that scissoring pain” while filing it, even so, as a kind of distinguishing mark — the shared fate of people who fuck a lot.

Like a nut in its shell

The second section opens with a bookkeeper’s paragraph and one of the book’s founding images. She gives numbers — at the largest orgies, up to 150 people, though not all of them fuck; she handles “the sex machines of around a quarter or a fifth of them” with hands, mouth, cunt, arse. Clubs vary. The Bois de Boulogne resists counting altogether. Should the men she sucked off through car windows with her head jammed against the steering wheel count the same as the men who invited her up into the cabin of a truck? Should the anonymous hands that reached through the open window to knead her breasts count at all? She arrives at a figure of forty-nine men she can attach a name or identity to, and concedes the rest to the fog:

I was abandoned to a hydra. Until, that is, Éric broke away from the group to prize me out of it, in his own words, ‘like a nut from its shell.’

Éric enters at twenty-one, pre-announced by mutual friends who kept telling her he was just right for her. With Claude the group sex had been continuous but unstructured; with Éric the soirées are curated. She prefers them. The chance scenes — a dinner that redistributes itself across the beds and sofas, a carful of friends circling the porte Dauphine until other cars latch on and everyone ends up intermingling in a large apartment — are fine, but she likes the choreographed ones better. “There was no rush and no tension… their comings and goings never strayed from their insect-like determination.”

Victor’s grotto

The set pieces begin. Victor’s birthday parties at his compound — guards with dogs, walkie-talkies, women in transparent blouses — intimidate her at first. She stands to one side with her champagne. Then she undresses:

My true clothing was my nudity, which shielded me.

The architecture amuses her because she recognises it. It is a scaled-up version of the Gaminerie, a then-fashionable boutique on the boulevard Saint-Germain: white stucco cave with cells, a grotto sunk underground, lit only from the bottom of a swimming pool on the floor above, so that the ceiling doubles as “a sort of vast television screen” through which bathers’ bodies knife past. On the bed or the sofa in one of the alcoves Éric arranges her — undresses her, exhibits her, kisses her briefly, hands her over. She almost always stays on her back. She is tugged and nibbled in several places at once; she prefers the stroking to the penetration; she likes in particular a cock that is dragged across her face or rubbed against her breasts, catching one in her mouth while another begs at her neck. What she remembers most, materially, is the aftermath:

the stiffness between my legs after being pinioned sometimes for four hours … When I was left to rest, I would become aware that my vagina was gorged. It was a pleasure feeling its walls stiffened, heavy, slightly painful, in their own way bearing the imprint of all the members that had touched base there.

The spider at place Clichy

Then a spatial variant: a sauna at place Clichy, where she barely leaves a single armchair all evening even though there is a big bed in the middle of the room. She calls this the position of “the active spider in the middle of her web” — head at cock-height, one in her mouth, one in each hand, legs hoisted high so that whoever gets aroused enough “followed through in my cunt.” The sweat in these scenes is everyone else’s; she sweats little. Sperm dries on her thighs, her breasts, her hair. She slips out now and again, ostensibly to the toilet, and it is in Victor’s bluish mirrored bathroom — “the deep, hazy image it reflected softened the atmosphere still further” — that she is startled to see her own body smaller and slimmer than it had felt a moment earlier under the bodies. There the exchanges are softer. Someone compliments her olive skin, or her mouth. She hears herself discussed as “a sleeping patient making out the doctor’s and the interns’ comments as they made their rounds of the beds.”

The Bois

Her kindness toward her partners, and theirs toward her, is one of the surprises of this chapter. She never suffers clumsiness or brutality. If she’s tired or uncomfortable she has only to say so — often via Éric, who is never far — and she’s left to rest. At orgies she is surrounded by an “unforced kindness, almost amounting to indifference” that suits her, since she is still young and awkward in ordinary social settings. The Bois mixes the classes more. She catches furtive looks of caution, even amazement, from men shyer than she is.

One Bois episode is rendered in full. She has found a concrete bench with a rough grainy surface; three or four groins surround her head; in the outer dark she can glimpse pale hands working their own cocks “like coiled springs quivering to the touch.” Then a sound — the graunching of a crash. Everyone scatters. A Mini has run into a bollard on the central reservation; there is a young woman inside, a dog running loops, yellow bollard-light mixing with white headlamp. Emergency sirens start up, distant; she goes back to the bench.

As if the space inside the little copse had been elastic, the circle formed again and the actors picked up the scene where it had been interrupted … the sight of the accident suddenly reinforced what had been a tacit link between us, and there I was back with my ephemeral little community, completely at one with its focused and very unusual activity.

Another Bois night, at the nearly deserted porte Dauphine, two very tall black men stand at the edge of the pavement looking as if they are waiting for an improbable bus. They lead her to a narrow attic room with a narrow bed; they take her one after the other, “like twins,” long slow cocks able to penetrate far without her having to spread her legs too wide; afterwards they chat to Éric about the Bois and their work as cooks, and thank her “with all the sincerity of polite hosts.”

Chez Aimé

Chez Aimé is the cradle. Situated beyond the sinister darkness of the Bois de Fausses-Reposes, down a skimpy suburban garden, it drew customers from abroad; years after it closed, Éric was still naming the film stars and athletes she might have brushed against without noticing. A comedy of the era had a scene set in a club very like it — a woman on a table, only her legs visible, kicking in high boots over the heads of the men — and she indulges the possibility that the director had seen her: she wore those boots, kept them on because they were hard to remove, and had indeed waved them in the air on a table more than once.

The table is the governing image. The walls are bare, the ceiling light hangs low, the rooms contain nothing but rough-hewn wooden tables; you can lie there two or three hours while twenty men take turns. She calls the woman-on-her-back-with-pubis-at-standing-man’s-level one of the most comfortable positions she knows — “vigorous and precise fucks” — and pays for its efficiency in wear and tear:

I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold onto the ends of the table with both my hands and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.

The full pleasure of it, though, arrives in an earlier, cooler sentence that turns the whole room into a game board:

The pleasure that I felt as I succumbed to a long session at Chez Aimé with my buttocks parked on the edge of a big wooden table and the overhead light hanging down over my torso as if I were some sort of boardgame, is equalled only by my loathing for the journey there.

She dreads the drive partly because of the strangers waiting and partly because of the effort the night will ask of her — a feeling, she notes, not unlike the one before giving a conference. “Both the men met in those situations and the audiences plunged in darkness are faceless.” When Aimé himself is finally summoned by the police and the club closes, she visits one last time; he is behind the bar, bulky and sulking, taking it out on his wife for having dissuaded the regulars from coming back.

Les Glycines

That same night they end up at Les Glycines — and here Millet sets one of the book’s cleanest disappointments. For years as a teenager she had watched this club from the window of her friend Henri’s tiny apartment on the rue de Chazel. Claude, Henri, and she used to stop at Henri’s on the way home from Sunday visits with their parents; the three of them fucked together under one of Martin Barré’s paintings (a picture they called “Spaghetti,” given to Henri by the artist himself), and afterwards they leaned out of the window to watch the swanky cars dropping off the silhouettes in their good coats. They were, she says, “just kids, the best kind of gawpers.” The actual interior, when she finally walks in, is lit like a dining room.

It was lit up like a dining room, there were a lot of people, lying naked on mattresses on the floor, and what unsettled me even more than the threat of the ‘employment officer’ was that people were telling jokes.

The hostess demands her social security card. A pale tousled woman with the ruins of a French pleat in her hair is making the room laugh about her little boy who “really wanted to come with her this evening.” Éric crawls along the skirting board looking for a power point, because he has arranged a swap with a couple and it would be nicer with the lights down. A waitress trips on the cable, restores the light, and says “shit” out loud. Millet does not wait to extract even the scantiest bodily emission.

She uses the anticlimax to draw a small distinction about ritual. Apart from in the Bois (and even there, even there), you greet people first; you maintain a transitional buffer — a glass offered, an ashtray handed over. Some rituals amuse her. Armand strips completely naked several minutes ahead of everyone else and folds his clothes like a butler. Some annoy her. One group insists on dining first at the same restaurant every time, like a school reunion, the high point of the evening being the “de-knickering” of one of the women at the table while the waiter does the rounds. What she cannot stand is salacious chatter at an orgy — play-acting used to delay the play rather than prelude it.

The passive woman

Halfway through she tucks in a brief accounting of herself that reframes everything:

It’s quite possible that I lost this belief [in God] when I started having sexual relationships. Finding myself vacant, then, with no other mission to fulfil, I grew into a rather passive woman, having no goal other than those that other people set for me … I’ve fucked in the same way. As I was completely available, I sought no more ideals in love than I did in my professional life, I was seen as someone who had no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited, and I had no reason not to fill this role.

Her memories, she says, interlink like rooms in a Japanese palace — closed chambers until a partition slides back onto a further succession, passages multiplying the deeper you go. Swingers’ clubs occupy little of it: Chez Aimé because it was the cradle, Les Glycines because it was the adolescent dream realised and therefore disappointing. Other places she can file by theme.

Cortèges and car parks

Two themes, briefly: processions and drifting. Avenue Foch, the service road: a cortège of cars led by theirs, an urgent need to pee, her dash to a tree on the grass strip, four or five other cars braking behind; a few men, misreading the gesture, walk towards her; Éric hurries over to explain. The car park at the porte de Saint-Cloud: an attendant watches fifteen cars disappear into the tunnel one after another and reappear, in the same order, an hour later; during that hour she is taken by about thirty men, held first against a wall and then laid on a car bonnet. Another night the convoy drifts for so long — a lead driver who knows a place, then admits he no longer remembers the way — that through the rear windscreen the headlights behind her “navigating left and right, disappearing and reappearing” begin to resemble the beginning of a journey. They finally wind up on the terraces of a sports stadium in Vélizy-Villacoublay, with “the patient pricks of those who had not got lost along the way.”

Drifting, the second theme, is governed by the question whispered from car to car at the porte Dauphine — “do you have a place?” — and by its attendant farce. Once, searching goes on too long; six of them squeeze into a Renault, spot two or three cars on a side road, and she steps out as, in her own formulation,

the brave and boastful little soldier going ahead in the name of all the others waiting behind me

to give the driver behind her a blow job. Two policemen arrive and take up positions in front of her as she withdraws. They ask the man now fumbling with his buttons whether he paid her, and they take down everyone’s name and address.

The museum under the overhead light

The block closes with another theme gathering itself for the next chapter — her anus, which she used for many years as often as her vagina, sometimes more. A beautiful apartment behind the Invalides, a mezzanine, floor-level lighting like an American film set, a coffee table shaped like a giant resin hand you could stretch out in, and a man she names as a Cheshire cat whose size initially frightens her but who manages without forcing and leaves her “amazed, and almost proud.” A much larger orgy on the rue Quincampoix, a low ceiling, a very dark apartment, men relaying the news in whispers — “she wants it up the arse,” “No, she only takes it from behind” — and that time it did, at the end, hurt. She logs the personal satisfaction of having had no restraint.

What runs under all of it is the posture she first mentioned at Chez Aimé: the body parked on the edge of the table under a low overhead light as if it were a museum boardgame, the vulva at standing hip height, faces appearing and disappearing above, strangers exchanging brief assessments as if on a ward round. The counting child from the opening page has grown into a woman who still numbers her encounters but has stopped needing the totals to resolve. Four hours on the table is not a collection. It is a duration. The hydra, before Éric reached in with his nutcracker, had no discrete members to tally.

Block 2: Imaginings — The Inner Theatre

Millet now turns inward, away from the count and the crowd, to examine the private chamber where the stories were first composed. What she finds, looking back, is that the architecture was already built before any of it was tested — that her future life had been drafted, in miniature, by a child who had not yet kissed anyone.

The Scrapbook and Its Keeper

She asks the question plainly and leaves it unresolved: how did a girl who had not yet experienced anything assemble fantasies so precise that they would later prove to be floor plans? The ingredients she can identify are almost comically thin — a few photographs in Cinemonde, an overheard remark from her mother about a girl in a café who “must be sleeping with everyone,” the fact that her father had come home late that same night from the same café.

What shreds of the real world… did I pick up and thread together, and what instinctual material did I formulate so that the stories I told myself as I rubbed the lips of my vulva together so accurately prefigured my future sexual adventures?

To that small heap she adds a news item that lodged in her like a seed. An ageing, obscure woman — a farm maid, she thinks — was arrested for killing her lover, and among her belongings the police found notebooks filled with the memory of extraordinarily many others: pasted letters, photographs, locks of hair. The crime did not interest Millet; the archive did.

I admired the fact that she had managed to collate this treasure, these traces of the men she had known within a few simple note pads of paper, and a secret corner of my libido was even more disturbed by the fact that this woman was ugly, alone, wild and outcast.

The child who liked sticking pressed flowers into a holiday book, who kept a scrapbook of Anthony Perkins and Brigitte Bardot, recognised a fellow collector. The collector was also a murderer and a social outcast, and this did not repel her — it deepened the charge.

The Mesh, Not the Wall

Millet proposes an unusual thesis about fantasy’s relationship to experience, one that reverses the usual picture. The imagined scenarios did not feed off her later life, nor did her life feed off them — they ran in parallel, tuned to the same key.

There are major structural similarities between situations I have lived and those I have imagined, even though I have never actively chosen to reproduce the latter in my life, and the details of what I have lived have had little part in nourishing my imaginings.

The fantasies, never shamed, never repressed, functioned as a kind of filter:

Having never felt ashamed of these fantasies, and having reworked and embellished them rather than trying to bury them, they offered no opposition to what was real but rather a sort of mesh through which real-life situations that other people might have found outrageous struck me as quite normal.

This is the mechanism she wants to name: fantasy as permission structure. Not a substitute for life, not a rehearsal, but a lens that pre-normalises what would otherwise need to be negotiated with shock.

The First Narrative: The Green Shed

The earliest masturbation scenario she can recover is set in a square she and her brother crossed on the way to school. Three lean-to shelters stood against a long wall, made of brick and wood, painted green and surrounded by shrubs — one for garden tools, two for public toilets. She would have been very small.

The very first narrative that accompanied my masturbating — and one that I used again and again for very many years — put me in a situation where I was dragged into one of these shelters by a boy. I saw him kissing me on the mouth and touching me all over as his friends came to join us. They all started fondling me. We always remained standing, and I spun round in the middle of the tightly-knit group.

The posture matters to her — standing, spinning, the circle. The geometry is the same one that will later appear in the Bois de Boulogne and elsewhere: a body at the centre of a ring.

The Cinema Queue

The Sunday matinée provided the second great stage set. She could not go alone, so in the fantasy she went alone.

Suddenly someone would squeeze my arse. And again, everyone else around me in the queue followed the example, and when I reached the ticket desk, the salesgirl could see that my skirt had been lifted up, and I would talk to her while someone rubbed themselves against my buttocks; I didn’t have any knickers on.

The scene elaborates itself with the generative logic of a dream. By the foyer her top is gone — and she pauses here to note a permanent adjustment her imagination has always made to her body: “I had formulated an image of myself as an adult blessed with resplendent breasts, an image I still resort to to this day in my fantasies, whereas my breasts are actually average size.” The fantasy self is not quite her.

Inside the auditorium a narrative grammar begins generating variants: the taciturn gang leader who inflames her and then turns away to kiss another girl, leaving her to his men on the carpet between the rows; respectable husbands who cross the dark aisle away from suspicious wives to press themselves on top of her; the lights coming back on mid-act; trips to the toilets and back; occasional police. Then a branch — the manager summons her to his office and sends for all the boys. Another branch — the gang follows her past the cinema to a stretch of wasteland, where behind a picket fence they strip her and form a human fence around her.

It was a compact group, forming a circle around me, like a second strip of fencing screening me from view. One by one, the boys broke away from the circle to press themselves against me.

Or she is in a nightclub between two men, kissing one while the other strokes her, turning, being passed along — “I kept swinging from left to right.” She notes, almost in parenthesis, that when she first began telling herself these stories she had probably not kissed anyone. She was a late starter. The after-school friends who came to her shared bedroom came to wrestle. Being well-built for her age, she often won.

The Gap at Puberty

Before she lets the fantasy scenarios pile up, she marks the distance between what the child could imagine and what the adolescent could tolerate. The disparity is important because it complicates any simple arc from precocious fantasy to easy practice.

A Hemingway novel — possibly The Sun Also Rises — had to be put down because one female character was described as having had several lovers. She never went back to it. And then her mother, laying the table one day, said the thing that had never been said aloud in the house:

I can just see her laying the table in the kitchen as she confided in me that she had had seven lovers in her life. ‘Seven,’ she said, looking at me, ‘it’s not all that many’, but there was a shy questioning in her eyes. I scowled. It was the first time I had heard anyone say out loud that a woman could know more than one man. She became a bit defensive.

The adult Millet registers the regret from a great height, and with a figure that is characteristic — quantitative, dry, slightly amused at her younger self:

What was seven compared to a score that was still open?

The Business Lunch, the Card Game

Once she understood what sexual acts actually consisted of, the scenarios absorbed the new information without abandoning the old grammar — coitus achieved did not stop the passage from one man to the next. The most detailed of these updates is set in a restaurant’s private salon.

I am the guest of a vulgar, fat man — pretending to be an uncle — at a business meal in a private salon in a restaurant. There are twenty or thirty men sitting down to eat, and my first contribution is to do the rounds, sucking each of them off under the table. I can picture their faces above me, surrendering saggily, as each of them successively, and briefly, logs out of the conversation.

Then she climbs onto the table and they find cigars and sausages to use on her; the meal continues; she is fucked in passing by guests, maître d’hôtel, waiters, and — if she has not come yet — the kitchen boys finish her off. She identifies the recurring shape: a group of men in the middle of their own business, stopping only briefly to come and use her before returning to what they were doing. A slight torque yields the domestic variant — the uncle becomes a stepfather, the conference becomes men playing cards or watching football, and they take turns coming over to the sofa while the others stay with their hand or their television.

The Fugue

She offers, then, her own most precise description of how the inner life has worked for decades. The musical analogy is hers, not imposed.

All my life I have gone back over, tinkered with and developed these few imagined situations with the application of someone composing a fugue, and those that serve me today are more or less altered versions of these originals.

An example of the compositional process: she once caught only an extract of Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse on television — a man walks past a couple making love, simply catching the young woman’s eye. The fragment has been rewritten many times inside her. In her version a delivery man enters her apartment without her having opened the door, finds her in the half-light of the bedroom watching a pornographic video, lies down on her without speaking, and is replaced by a second, then a third. The story branches: a friend is coming to pick her up and she must get ready, so she carries on fucking standing up, taking care not to smudge her makeup; when the friend rings the bell she goes to the door “waddling like a duck” with one of the delivery men’s dicks still inside her; he unzips; etc.

The Talker

The back third of this section turns from solitary fantasy to a particular form of shared fantasy — not the cliché dirty talk she catalogues with some weariness (“little sucker in chief,” “spunk bag,” “it’s so big,” “it’s so hard”), which she dissects as a near-liturgical language whose very stereotypy is part of its function:

Because, paradoxically, these words need less reciprocation than caresses do, dirty words are always more stereotyped and perhaps some of their power derives from the very fact that they belong to the most immutable inheritance. So, in the end, even words — which should help to distinguish us from each other — serve to fuse us all together and to accelerate the annihilation of the senses that we are all trying to achieve in those moments.

What interests her much more is something rarer — “a complete running commentary throughout the act, given by two voices, in counterpoint to the physical exchange.” One partner, in particular, widened her understanding of what she calls fornicatory communion. He begins by telling her he will take her to a hotel. There will be men queued along the corridor. He asks how much she thinks they will pay — the exchange that follows is set out on the page like a duet.

‘How much did I think they would pay to off-load in my cunt?’ I suggested: ‘Fifty francs?’ The correct sum was whispered quietly in my ear: ‘That’s far too much. No, they’ll give twenty francs to fuck you from the front and thirty to give it to you up the arse. How much of it are you going to take?’

She under-estimates; he corrects her with a thrust; the numbers climb, and so do the degradations, each partner adding a line that the other accepts or raises. The boys too young who come before they are inside her; the old men with unwashed scabs; urine; excrement; cleaning the folds of arseholes with her tongue; her feigned initial refusal and the slap that answers it; the hotel manager’s dog, which someone will pay to watch her take. The call-and-response reads as its own genre — not boasting, not begging, but collaborative drafting.

We spoke in measured tones with all the precision and attention to detail of two scrupulous witnesses helping each other reconstruct a past event.

What is striking is that she reports her body following only sometimes. The fantasy film and the actual act ran on separate reels and only occasionally aligned. When the man neared orgasm he went quiet. She, for her part, tended to pull the scenario inward and smaller — the shed on the building site became a concierge’s loge in a building under repair, the bed hidden by a curtain, only her legs and stomach showing, the workmen filing in without seeing her face and without her seeing theirs, the concierge directing traffic.

The fugue ends, for now, on this image: the central body invisible at the centre, and the line of men, regulated by a third party, passing through a cramped room she has pulled down to the scale of childhood.

Block 3: Communities — The Regulars

Millet opens this stretch with a distinction that will govern everything that follows. There are, she says, two ways of picturing a multitude: as a crowd in which people dissolve into each other, or as a chain in which each link is individuated precisely because it’s hooked to the next. She belongs to the second kind of multitude.

There are two ways of envisaging a multitude, either as a crowd in which individual identities become confused, or as a chain where conversely what distinguishes them from each other is also what links them together, as one ally compensates for another’s weaknesses, as a son resembles his father even though he rebels. The very first men I knew immediately made me an emissary of a network in which I couldn’t hope to know all the members, the unwitting link in a family joined as in the bible.

“Emissary” is the operative word. Catherine is not a recruiter — she never flirts, never pulls, never initiates. Her role in the network is to be the node that transmits, the point where any two men who happen to know her can be said to know each other through her body.

The ethic of availability

She is explicit that her social awkwardness is structurally load-bearing. The sexual act is a refuge from the conversation she can’t hold. What she can’t offer in small talk she offers in every orifice, at any hour, with no fuss and — crucially — no performance. She assembles her own portrait from what her partners say about her, like Proust’s character seen only in the mirror of other people’s impressions:

‘You never said no, never refused anything. You didn’t make a fuss.’ ‘You were far from inert, but you weren’t demonstrative either.’ ‘You did things so naturally, you were neither reticent nor dirty, just a tad masochistic from time to time…’ ‘At an orgy, you were always the first, right out there…’ ‘I remember Robert would send a taxi for you as if there was some emergency, and you would go.’ ‘People thought of you as some sort of phenomenon; even with an incredible number of guys you would still be the same, right up to the end, at their mercy. You didn’t act the little woman who wants to please her man, or as the ball-breaking bitch. You were a mate who happened to be a girl, a girl-friend.’

And the line she cites with visible pleasure, from a friend’s diary: ‘Catherine who deserves the highest praise for her calmness and availability in every situation.’ The tone is that of a recommendation letter. She takes it as one.

The first chain: Claude, the colleagues, the swap

Claude — the first man she knew — introduces her to the second. A slightly older couple: a short, athletic man and his Mongolian-featured wife with cropped blond hair and the kind of “stiff personality” with which intelligent women sometimes modulate their sexual freedom. Perhaps Claude had slept with the wife first; in any case, he arranges for Catherine to sleep with the husband. They rent a studio next door to the couple’s apartment and settle into a loosely arranged swap. Catherine crosses the landing one way, the wife crosses it the other.

The partition wall was like a television remote-control: there was a different film on if you switched sides.

The one breach of the symmetry happens on holiday in Brittany, in a cold mellow afternoon light, with all four of them briefly in the same room. The husband draws her head down to his lap while his wife wanders in and out. Catherine notices — mid-act, glancing up — the wife’s “gently vacuous” expression and the husband’s “almost disbelieving” one. She remembers it not for the sex but for the revelation it triggers. Relationships among friends, she realises, can grow like a climbing plant, branching and re-knotting themselves in reciprocal freedom; and precisely because of that, each person inside the plant must still decide for themselves, alone.

I like this paradoxical solitude.

The art world as breeding ground

The second community is the one her profession gives her. When she starts out as a critic, the Parisian art world’s rallying points are not cafés but galleries and magazine offices, and she lives right on Saint-Germain-des-Prés where the modern-art galleries are. The commute from vernissage to bedroom is a few hundred metres.

She recalls a shy painter friend on the rue Bonaparte, “a shy boy who never really looked up,” who somehow conveys that he’d like to make love to her, perhaps without even touching her. She doesn’t flirt back; she simply takes him home. The pleasure, she says, is in the moment of her decision and the other’s slight bewilderment — an “intoxicating feeling of fulfilling a heroine’s destiny” — and the best way to put him at ease is a daffy little speech about the girl-who’s-just-escaped-her-parents’-clutches. One man who made that same walk up to her attic room later told her the coarse fabric over her bed had looked like a tarpaulin laid down to protect the mattress from what was coming.

The rue Bonaparte studio becomes the functional clubhouse. William — a contributor to a Germano Celant exhibition she visits in Genoa — becomes a regular. Their first encounters are a gallery groping set to the rhythm of Catherine being slightly stunned that a cock in trousers can feel “so hard, like something inert, not like part of a living body.” William teaches her the English words cock and pussy between kisses; she deploys them back at him in the corner of a service door behind the rue du Four post office. I want your cock in my pussy. “Explosive laughter,” then the walk to the studio.

The etiquette of bringing a third

Within this little clubhouse an etiquette develops. The standard evening: one of the men has picked up a girl somewhere and brings her in, and the question is whether she can be persuaded to share. Often she can’t, and when she can’t, Catherine’s role is reassignment — from fellow participant to emotional first-responder:

It doesn’t always work and when it doesn’t I am given the job of reassuring her, consoling her. The boys disappear discreetly to have a cigarette on the landing. I don’t actually speak, I cajole, give her a gentle hug; girls are more easily conned by another girl.

The details she notes are anthropological, not salacious. One girl, years later, admitted she’d refused because she was a virgin and had burst into tears. Henri remembers another girl whose tears had smudged her mascara, and how he’d locked himself and Catherine into the tiny kitchen-cum-bathroom to clean her face — and how from the communal toilets on the landing he could hear them moaning through the skylights. “She probably wanted to thumb her nose at the boys,” Catherine notes, “and I, perversely, went along with her.”

The one exception with Léone

Millet inserts here a careful aside about women. She can always tell when a woman is attracted to her and has never expected pleasure from one; she participates in girl-on-girl scenes “so as not to break the rules of the game.” She looks at women tenderly on the street — inventorying their wardrobes, guessing the contents of their make-up bags — but the excitement stops at the visual. She feels, rather, a “communal sympathy for hard-working women” and for the “valiant warriors of the sexual liberation.” One dyke friend once told her, with a swinger’s economy: ‘giving the same man head brought us together; we are both dickheads.’

The exception is Léone. At an improvised orgy where half the guests had brought the other half along as novices, Catherine finds herself on the thick black carpet of a bathroom with a blonde “who had curves everywhere: cheeks, neck, breasts and buttocks of course, even down to the ankles.” The name struck her — Léone — majestic, leonine. The passage that follows is Millet at her most lyrical, and it is worth letting run:

Léone had taken a little persuading before going with the flow. Now she was completely naked, like a golden Buddha in his temple. I was a little lower than her because she was sitting on the step that ran all the way round the raised bath… My whole face burrowed noisily in her fleshy vulva. I had never sucked on such a swollen extremity and it really did fill my mouth, as Marseillais say, like an giant apricot. I latched onto her labia like a leech, then I dropped the fruit and stretched my tongue so far I almost tore its root, the better to dive into the extraordinary softness of her opening, a softness which makes the smoothness of breasts and shoulders pale into insignificance.

When everyone has re-dressed, Paul, less tactful than the others, asks Léone point-blank if she’s glad she let herself be talked into it. Léone lowers her eyes, emphasises the first word of her reply — one person had made an impression on her — and Catherine, listening, offers up a small silent prayer: Please, God, let it be me.

Missionary zeal, Bataille as alibi

She and Henri had Bataille to hand as a ready-made philosophy, but looking back, Henri is probably right that what drove them wasn’t theory at all but “youthful playfulness.” The tiny apartment’s alcove bed felt like a den; when four or five of them piled onto it, dinner had simply turned into a round of “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours,” the hors d’oeuvre being feet-groping under the table or a finger offered up coated in “particularly clear and slightly smelly sauce.” Henri liked to bring a girl he’d picked up in an arcade half an hour before, and the whole team would trek through the four-a.m. streets to her apartment, bent on disturbing her tidy bed.

Half the time the ploy failed. The girl would let someone take off her bra, even her tights, and then end the evening “clamped to a chair” insisting she really couldn’t but was fine with watching, thanks, and could someone drive her home later. Catherine has watched men and women alike take that refuge on an incongruous upright chair, riveted by pale limbs flailing a few centimetres away —

a few centimetres which put them in a whole different time frame. They don’t take part so you cannot really say that they are fascinated. Lagging behind – or shooting ahead – they are the patient, studious viewers of an edifying documentary.

She is honest that the missionary zeal was skin deep — the little challenges were set for themselves, not for the initiates. A failed evening on the boulevard Beaumarchais: a bearded friend with a bland laugh, his modern wife who balks and goes to bed, the ritual of transgression reduced to Henri pissing on Catherine in the cast-iron bath. “No, no, Henri corrects me, he was the only one to piss on me.” Even this is recounted with the exactitude of someone restoring a provenance.

Domestic arrangements, fraternal traffic

For several months she lives in a friend’s tiny unfurnished attic. The friend’s bedroom door stays open during sex; neither the friend nor her boyfriend moderates their exclamations. Catherine doesn’t join in — she thinks of herself “almost as their little girl” — but with “that stubbornness peculiar to children and animals” makes sure the boyfriend and the other men in her own circuit are shared systematically with her beautiful hostess. Four or five times, the hostess gets the same cocks between her thighs that Catherine does. Catherine particularly likes it when the hostess, looking Jacques dead in the eye, tells him loudly that he’s “hung like a horse.” She had forgotten, until Jacques reminded her years later, that she once pitched a tantrum and kicked him while he was fucking the hostess — a rare eruption of the jealousy she otherwise picked at only in other people, who never admitted theirs.

Alexis, one of the young critics in her circle, lives in a “cute duplex on the rue des Saints-Pères.” She sometimes goes to wake him in the morning, stopping at the boulangerie on the way — she feels, she says, as if she’s in a film about the free and easy lives of the young bourgeoisie. Alexis likes to tease her about her promiscuity: at least at this hour, he says, he can be sure he’s the first man of the day to penetrate her. Well, no, actually — she has another man’s cum still in her from the night before. She stifles her laughter in the pillow. He is a little upset.

The family metaphor, taken literally

Claude hands her Histoire d’O and she ticks three of the heroine’s boxes: always ready; sodomised as often as taken from the front; longing for the reclusive house isolated from the world. She has used the word family many times already and she means it half-literally. She has the adolescent habit of exerting her pull inside a family circle — going from brother to brother, from boyfriend to his sister. In one case, two brothers and their uncle: she’s a friend of the uncle, who brings the nephews along. Where in other scenes the uncle’s friends required stage-management and preamble, the family configuration is stripped down:

The uncle would get me going and the two brothers would give me a good shafting. I would relax afterwards listening to their man’s talk about some DIY gadget or some new software.

The scene’s coolness is the point. The post-coital conversation about power tools is part of the inventory.

Art-world circuits, the Art Press cohort

She meets Alexis through a group of young critics trying to start new art magazines. She’s sleeping with two other people on the same circuit; Alexis once asked her, tartly, whether she had “set myself a schedule to be ‘shagged by every young critic in France.’” The two spotty, married colleagues took their shots in different registers — one guilt-tripped her (seeing I was sleeping with everyone it would be churlish of me not to sleep with him), the other played it confidently: summoned her to his publisher’s office where the receptionist warned him, with professional consideration, that the young woman waiting downstairs wasn’t wearing a bra. Both men would later become long-serving collaborators on Art Press.

Robert, and the road to Éric

It is Robert who brings her to the threshold of Éric. She meets Robert while researching a piece on art foundries; he takes her down to Le Creusot, where he’s casting a monumental sculpture. On the drive back he climbs into the back of the car and lies full length on top of her, his head on her abdomen, her pelvis angled over the edge of the seat, the driver glancing in the rear-view mirror to comment that she didn’t seem to be on top of things. For a long time afterwards she saw Robert almost daily; he introduced her to a lot of people. She could tell, instinctively, which of these introductions could turn sexual and which couldn’t — and Robert had the same instinct, even devising a way to ward off the wrong candidates by warning them she was a critic with influence.

Robert used to joke about the combination of my sexual appetite and my professional curiosity; he would say that I would be able to write a piece about plumbing if I went out with a plumber. And he always maintained that, given my personality, the person I had to meet was Éric.

In the end she meets Éric through a different mutual friend — “a very edgy boy, one of those men who pounds into you with mechanical power and regularity” — but Robert’s diagnosis was right. Éric, she says simply, would end up introducing her to more men than anyone else, and — in the same breath, with a straight face — to “a rigorous way of working to which I still adhere.”

Aesthetics and erotics overlap

The pattern, she notes, has a shape: her relationships map onto aesthetic groupings. The painter Gilbert remembers that when she visited him at the apartment he shared with his family, she restricted herself to “discreet fellatio”; penetration was reserved for when he came to her studio. On his first such visit, he didn’t finish well because at the last moment she redirected him to her anus — her “primitive method of contraception,” bolstered by an image of her body as an integral whole with no hierarchy among its orifices, each substitutable for any other. Another painter of the same school made a point of teaching her to put her cunt to better use. An early-morning interview turned into a stay until the next day; she remembers the powerful light flooding down through the glass roof onto her upturned face and blinding her; she remembers him telling her, afterwards, with persuasive gentleness, that one day she would meet a man who would know how to bring her to orgasm from the front, and that it would be better than the other way.

New York: William has joined an artists’ collective and she ends up spending the night with John, another member, whose English-language theory lectures her “approximative understanding” had turned lurid, his cheekbones sharpened by the movement of his lips. She’s in town to meet Sol LeWitt. William scoops her up, carries her to a mattress behind a half-height wall, kisses her, urges John to do the same, then leaves them. John is gentle where William was “nervous, abrupt.” Eventually he falls asleep with his hand clamped onto her pubis, and she has to extricate herself by slow contortionist’s inches in order to make her flight.

Boredom, and the little breakaways

By now the shyness of earlier years has burned off. What has taken its place is boredom.

Even amongst friends whose company I enjoy, even if at first I follow the conversation and I am no longer afraid to join in, there always comes a moment when I suddenly lose interest. It’s a question of time: all of a sudden I have had enough; whatever subject we are tackling I feel as if I’m turning to stone like when I watch one of those TV soaps which recreates humdrum domesticity too accurately. It is irreversible.

Her escape is tactile and tacit: a thigh pressed under the table, ankles crossed with the man next to her, or — better — the woman, because it’s less likely to have consequences. In the context of communal life — a summer villa, a group holiday — she absents herself from outings by the same means. “Particularly frenetic summers, defined by the incessant traffic between sexual partners, sporadically united in little orgies under the sun behind the low wall of a garden that overlooked the sea, or at night in the comings and goings between the many bedrooms of a villa.”

One such evening she decides to opt out. Paul — who knows her well, who sometimes drags her into the bathroom and locks the door to whet her appetite for the mêlée — teases her and promises to send over a friend she hasn’t met, a car mechanic with no connection to the art world. She barely registers the offer. She settles into the deep of an armchair to enjoy the rare emptiness.

There is something delicious about those moments when the emptiness around you opens up not only the space around you but also, somehow, the enormity of the time ahead. With unconscious economy, we make the most of this given opportunity by lazily settling into the very depths of an armchair as if to leave as much space as possible to the onrushing time.

The car mechanic appears in the kitchen doorway — tall, dark, pale-eyed, impressive in the dark — while she’s mid-sandwich. She chucks the sandwich away furtively, ashamed of the crumbs. He drives her along the Grande Corniche above Nice in a convertible, taking detours before going home; she undoes his belt one-handed and does a conscientious job without impeding his gearshifts. “As far as I can remember, it was a very pleasant encounter.” She didn’t stay the night — she wanted this one, for once, to remain outside the group’s shared inventory, a private place to which the others “would not have access.”

Freedom as a one-time vow

She pauses, here, to define her freedom with some care, and it’s worth quoting at length because this passage is a kind of constitution:

Mine was not the kind of freedom played out on the whims of circumstances, it was a freedom expressed once and for all, an acceptance to abandon oneself unreservedly to a way of life (like a nun saying her vows!)

The nun analogy is not throwaway. It explains why she has never slept with a stranger on a train, in the metro, in a lift, in a restaurant toilet. She finds the feverishly erotic chance-encounter story — the one other women breathlessly tell — closed to her. She cuts such approaches short, abruptly. She couldn’t sustain the “teasing banter which necessarily occupies the interval between a chance meeting with someone and accomplishing the sexual act with them.” Only animal directness, in her view, would work — and since the metro does not yet accept animal directness in its midst the way it accepts abject misery, there is nothing to be done. She doesn’t qualify as a woman “looking for adventure.”

What she will accept is the phone call: a voice claiming to have met her at some function, a rendezvous arranged sight-unseen. That’s how she ends up at La Bohème one evening next to a balding, jowly stranger who may or may not have been at the party she was also at a few days before. He puts his great bony hand on her thigh, complains of terrible headaches, takes her to shows and expensive restaurants where she finds her chief entertainment not in being mistaken for a prostitute but in the fact that she’s outwitting the clientele, “given that it was with a bona fide intellectual that the bald gentleman with the drooping skin was in conversation with.”

The long afterlife of a one-night stand

The Art Press switchboard operator Hortense still, years later, puts through calls from men whose names mean nothing to Catherine but who “won’t take no for an answer.” From the careful, conspiratorial tone she quickly clocks the register: they are calling the good-time girl they remember. And if, at a private view, she’s introduced to someone who gazes at her too long and insists we’ve already met, she assumes he had the leisure to memorise her face during a scene in which her own gaze was fixed on his pubic hair. She no longer has the curiosity to pursue any of this. But she retains —

a profound admiration and sympathy for the suspension in time in which swingers live. It could be ten years, not to say twenty or more, since a man has had the pleasure of a woman, he still talks about it and addresses her as if it were yesterday. Their pleasure is like a hardy perennial which knows no seasons. It flourishes in a greenhouse, isolated from outside contingencies so that they always see the body they held in the same way, even if it is now withered or lying stiffly in a robe.

The deflation is always the same. Somewhere in the reconnection call a “password” question arrives — Are you married now? — Yes. — Lovely, I’ll give you a call next time I’m in Paris. She never hears from them again.

Preliminaries, for once

She closes the section with a careful concession. The preliminaries which many women call the most delicious part of a relationship — and which she has always tried to shorten as brutally as possible — she has experienced in only two exceptional cases. One: when desire was already, unbeknownst to her, a breakaway from a deeper loving relationship. Two: after a long period of abstinence.

The first case she describes as a “gentrification” of her erotic life: a frustrating photographic sitting because the lighting was never right, a funeral-silent elevator ride, tiny kisses and sketchy bites stolen along the top of her bare arm as she leaned over the layout table. “I inhaled these libidinous emanations rather like an asthmatic who unwisely strays into a stifling hot-house.”

The second case is Jacques. She has no ear for music and goes to the opera only for reasons unrelated to music, and yet it is through his voice — reading a text on a tape, played to her over the phone — that Jacques first entered her. The voice, she says, was neither velvet nor cracked; it had “the clarity and the calm rhythm of its brief inflexions, as firm and assured as a hand turning up its palm to mean ‘there you have it.’” Later he calls to point out a typo, offers to come in and help correct the catalogue, and the two of them sit inches apart in a cramped office for hours. After one such session he invites her to dinner at a close friend’s place. Squeezed onto a bed-serving-as-sofa, he strokes her wrist with the back of his index finger — “an unexpected, unusual and quite delicious gesture, and it still moves me now, even when it is addressed to someone else’s skin.” She follows him home. In the morning:

He asked me who I was sleeping with. ‘With lots of people,’ I replied. ‘Damn,’ he said, ‘I’m beginning to fall in love with a girl who’s sleeping with lots of people.‘

Block 4: The Pleasure of Telling, and Always First Times

The Pleasure of Telling

The book now turns inward. Having catalogued her partners, venues, and geometries, Millet stops to consider the peculiar pleasure of the act she is currently performing — speaking, in detail, about what she has done. Telling, for her, is not confession and not provocation; it is a second, parallel sexuality, quieter than the flesh and in some ways more ambitious. She kept very little from anyone except her parents (the thought of her mother picturing her wedding night was, she recalls, “truly a source of torment”), and over time she worked out what the lifestyle was actually for:

I have gradually and obscurely come to understand what this lifestyle had to offer me: the illusion of opening myself to innumerable possibilities.

A demanding job, no money, the family she’d inherited, the men she lived with — all of these drew the walls in. Sex drew them out again. But because reality still capped what she could actually do (“my thighs would have formed a link around only a tiny part of the human chain”), language had to take up the rest of the work. The sentence itself became an act of liberation. She gives it to us as an aside to an imagined listener:

I am here, with you, but if I talk about it, I pull aside the sheet, I open up a breach in the wall, and I let in the entire army of lovers which surrounds us.

Her method with new friends was almost diplomatic. Around the third or fourth meeting she’d drop in a man’s name, attached to some ordinary activity but with enough ambiguity to be readable both ways, and watch the face opposite her. She was not preaching. She was sorting — sincerely, on three tracks: protecting herself, identifying whether the listener belonged to her community of swingers, and, whatever came back, appealing to his curiosity.

With one lover, talk and sex were fused. He wanted real names, real places, exact counts — not fantasy but inventory:

I had to give names, describe places and say exactly how many times. If I failed to specify when describing a new acquaintance, he was quick to ask: ‘Did you sleep with him?’

And the questions, when they came, ran the spectrum from forensic to almost tender. The colour of a glans. How many fingers. But also: was he in love with you? What did the carpet look like? She learned to deliver the set pieces — the bouncer at the Johnny Halliday show, the Harley that had no back seat so the frame carved into her as they rode home, the friend who fucked her in the middle of a high-tech studio while wearing floaty crotchless knickers as a “baroque touch in that austere setting.” The last she had to retell dozens of times, long after she’d stopped seeing the man in question. She notes, with the critic’s precision she carries into every scene, why she never invented:

I never invented an adventure that hadn’t happened, and my descriptions betrayed reality no more than any transposition inevitably does. As I have already pointed out, the realm of fantasy and the realm of experience may well be close neighbours but, to me, they are still independent of each other like a landscape painting and the corner of the countryside that it actually represents; there is more of the artist’s interior vision than reality in the painting. The fact that, from then on, we see that reality through the prism of the painting does not stop the trees from growing or their leaves from dropping.

It is one of her cleanest formulations of what the book itself is attempting. Not transcription. Not invention. A painted version of a real field.

Outside the bed, the telling took a different shape — a careful architecture between two people who wanted to keep the heat on without collapsing the structure:

In that instance, the words hang in the space between those who are speaking, like a house of cards built up by their play of questions and answers, and which they hope won’t suddenly crumble in the face of prematurely salacious confessions or a curiosity which too quickly becomes indiscreet.

One friend, a journalist, interviewed her matter-of-factly from the driver’s seat of his clapped-out car — how old were you when you started, what sort of people, how many in one evening — then pulled over to the kerb not to touch her but to keep asking. Eventually he wrote her up in a review. Within her own circle the talk served a social function: a low, constant hum of erotic recognition that let club members identify each other at a house-warming, tolerate small talk, file away who was doing what with whom. At such a party she describes, very precisely, the pleasure of narrating sex with an unappealing man to another man she has never slept with — the twinned relish of the dirty image and the listener’s disgust.

She is honest about what the talk did and did not survive. Telling was always indexed to feeling:

Added to this is the fact that even the most truthful speech is obviously never absolute, is always indexed by the way feelings have evolved.

With Jacques — the man she lived with, the writer — she had been very talkative at first, then discovered that being loved meant the accounts had to stop, even though she would later find her own anecdotes surfacing, reworked, in his novels. Of all the long relationships, only two men shut her down completely, and she suspects even that silence was itself a kind of conversation.

Then, almost as a footnote to her theory of liberal pleasure, a grim counter-weight: jealousy. She puts the problem precisely. Those who hold moral principles have a framework for it; libertines are “left feeling helpless in the face of passion.”

A person can prove their extensive and sincere liberality by sharing the pleasure they take with the person they most love, only for it to be pierced, without any warning, by an exactly proportional intolerance.

The violence, when it came, came from inside the circle. She was once beaten the length of a Paris street after a party that had barely been an orgy — “beaten and trampled in the gutter… forced to walk on by a series of punches to the top of my neck and my shoulders, the way they used to drive common thieves to the dungeons” — and, later that night, retraced the path not to process the attack but to look for a dropped piece of jewellery. Another time, one of her “unwisely detailed accounts” earned her a razor slash on the right shoulder as she lay sleeping on her stomach, the blade first carefully disinfected on the gas hob. The scar, she says, “in the shape of a stupid little mouth, is a good illustration of what I felt at the time.” The deadpan is almost aggressive.

Her own jealousy she rations. She felt nothing for friends’ marriages — “perhaps contempt” — and has only known it with live-in partners, and even then along different lines for each. With Claude it was vanity: the sharp little injuries of watching him take a woman she judged prettier. With Jacques it was eviction — the image of some other woman occupying the running board of the car, the sink, the inside of her motorbike helmet. Her response was either a fantasy of public suicide (the Seine, not far from the boulevard Diderot) or a masturbatory campaign in which Jacques himself became the only male figure and her older characters — the delivery boys, the workmen on waste land — were expelled from her head. This lasted until the old fantasies reasserted themselves.

She closes the section with what she calls her one failed attempt at prostitution — a set piece that turns on her inability to talk money. A school friend sent her to a man in a Montparnasse café who looked “like an estate agent,” ostensibly to set up an encounter with an older woman; Millet realised the woman was a decoy as soon as he took her to a little hotel on rue Jules-Chaplain. She gave him a blow-job, steadily, on her knees, while her head churned through the unanswerable questions:

Should I say anything more about the woman we were meant to be meeting? That would be stupid. Should I ask for money for this fellatio? But shouldn’t I have done that first? What was I going to tell the friend who was waiting for me?

She was surprised by how young and unguarded his face became when he came — “it was also the only time in my life that I saw out the pleasure of a man I didn’t like” — and afterwards, on a café terrace nearby, the friend who’d been watching took one look at her mouth and called her a fool. The reason this prostitution failed, she explains earlier, is structural. Money requires negotiation; she only ever knew how to start with the body:

It is only when I have, as it were, found my bearings with the body, when the grain of the skin and its particular pigmentation have become familiar to me, or I have learned to adjust my own body to it, that my attention could focus onto the person themselves, often – as I have said – to form a sincere and lasting friendship. But by then it would no longer be right to be asking for money.

The inventory of what men did give her — since she never asked — is perhaps the book’s funniest paragraph, listed with an ambassador’s gravity: orange sparkly stockings never worn, three bakelite bangles, an off-white knitted set from the winter 1970 prêt-à-porter collections, an authentic Berber wedding dress, a newsagent’s watch, a Zolotas ring that tarnished, a Japanese electric dildo, three metallic vaginal balls that never worked, a YSL bath towel, extensive free dental care, a forgotten loan. “You looked lost,” a very old friend tells her. “People just couldn’t help themselves giving you 100-franc notes.”

Always first times

The second subsection opens with a shift. Not every life is a straight line of appetite; at certain moments — a move, an illness, a new work environment — a person steps off the track they were on and looks down at themselves. Millet identifies two such moments. The first was her decision, at Jacques’s request, to hide nothing from him before they moved in together; the honesty, oddly, imposed a small but real guilt that made her orgies rarer and more tentative. The second was a specific evening at the apartment of a couple she thought of privately as “parodies of characters from Citizen Kane” — a newspaper editor and a singer. Some guests had peeled off into a bedroom where a young woman was being covered by a succession of broad backs, crying out so loudly it filled the flat. Millet, on the sitting-room sofa under a chandelier, did something she had never done before: she paused.

For the first time ever, I was pausing during one of those sessions in which I normally operated without stopping. And I appreciated that pause in the same way as I valued those moments when I withdrew into myself during a meal or meeting with friends.

She understood, sitting there, that by constantly talking about sex, commenting on it, interpreting it “with the arsenal of a lay psychoanalyst,” and by going three times a week to a couch “not to fuck but to talk about it,” she had — without noticing — taken on the role of an observer as well as a participant. This is the doubling that made the book possible.

From that pause came a discovery that reorganises the whole first part of the memoir. She put it very plainly:

And it was when I moved away from the centre of the spiral that I discovered something: my pleasure was never more intense than when it was the first time, not the first time that I made love with someone, but the first time we kissed; even the first embrace was enough.

The numbers Part 1 has been toting up — the hundreds of bodies, the cars, the stairwells, the studios — turn out to have been a search for a very specific sensation that kept arriving only at the threshold. After it, most of what followed was:

a bit like biting into the cone when you no longer have a mouthful of icecream to melt on your tongue, it had all the attraction of a painting that you admire but on which you are feasting your eyes for the fifteenth time.

The recollections she pulls up for this are not of penetration but of the first touch. Late at night in the lobby of an Intercontinental, an elegant colleague she has been travelling with for two weeks catches her arm as they say goodnight, pulls her to him, kisses her on the mouth, and says he’ll come to her room in the morning. She feels the spasm rise into her stomach and twists her ankle walking towards the receptionists. Another time, she dives onto a carpet beside a host who has slumped down next to his guests after a drink; he pulls her towards him by the neck of her sweater and gives her “one of those cinema kisses that makes your head roll from side to side,” his wife audible in the next room, a friend on the floor watching in amazement at face level. She goes completely limp. And at the “Dernier Picasso” show at the Pompidou, walking through rooms with a lover named Bruno, his presence becomes unbearably acute the moment he moves out of sight, and she feels a brief, distinct secretory discharge, then walks the rest of the exhibition with the slimy patch on her tights shifting against her thigh.

The paradox she has spent her life navigating is here in compact form. In her earlier years she didn’t much mind whether the first-touch charge was ever matched by what followed; later, once she’d understood how singular that charge was, she began to wish it could be repeated and sustained inside a relationship. Two affairs in her middle years — one easy, one chaotic — both confirmed the rule: desire slowly built, then “culminated in passionate episodes of copulating during which my satisfaction was never as complete as it had been in the inaugural physical contact.”

The chaotic one was the man from the Picasso show. For years she would go to see him daily for weeks, then turn up and find the door closed for months, until at last “a hoarse interjection on the telephone” would authorise her to come again. The uncertainty itself worked on her. They would stand talking books in a room bare enough to please a Quaker; eventually she would move towards him and he’d say, in the voice of an adult interrupted by a child, “Do we want a little cuddle?” Two fingers, then four, would pull a cry out of her that was as much shock as pleasure. He would pass his palm the full length of her body “as if I had been but a sketch.” She details her corresponding, minute exploration of him — ear, groin, armpits, the parting between his buttocks, the lines in his palms — and the specific shape of the intercourse she was hoping for all through the preliminaries: him turning her over, taking her from behind, the surprise of a harder thrust every three or four. And yet it was almost always his fingers, at the start, that gave her the intense pleasure. She kept returning on the theory that next time might be different, “trying to force the resistance of that closed door, or of the moral lesson.”

Earlier still, there had been the photographer — “the author of the failed photographs taken in my office” — who met her in a hotel near the Gobelins or in a borrowed apartment at odd office hours:

the day before I could already feel the anticipation of my snatch responding to the vibrating metro seat while I looked forward to our reunion. The feeling could be so maddening that I sometimes preferred to get off a few stops before my destination and to calm myself down by walking.

He could lick her indefinitely. When he finally entered, just as carefully, the pleasure never caught up with the build. And when he didn’t turn up at all — the small logistical failures of two busy lives — the afterwards was a kind of paralysis:

I would stay lying on the bed, swinging my legs, my wanting wedged painfully between my legs, stopping me from closing them like a crossstrut. Afterwards I felt an apparently insurmountable oppression, it stopped me completing the day’s tasks, going back to the office, making telephone calls, or making even the simplest decisions.

She notes, drily, that this asthenia — which “always hovers over me” — never crosses the threshold of the office, where the door functions as a perfectly impermeable screen.

It is at this point that the book becomes openly reflexive. Millet names the conditions under which she began to think of writing it:

Would I ever have thought of writing this book which opens with a chapter called ‘Numbers’, if I had not once experienced being a minute satellite which suddenly left the orbit where it had been held by a whole network of connections but which now no longer govern it?

The lift-off, she says, came in two stages. Stage one: rising excitement that failed to resolve. She learned to recognise the precursor signs — cold lips, goose-pimples — and then, more often than not, found that the process ground to a halt in front of what felt like an insurmountable wall rather than a release. In those gaps she began doing something that reads as the book’s primal scene: examining the emotion itself with the attention of an art critic drafting a paragraph.

What name should I give to this singular emotion? That was the question I put to myself. It was in fact, I’m sure, a loathing of whoever was next to me at the time, but one which was obviously independent of my feelings for him the rest of the time. But at that moment this loathing filled me as closely and as fully as a liquid metal occupies a mould.

She tried out similes — the hermetic dice of Tony Smith’s sculpture — and found that the hatred, lacerating as it was, dissolved the moment she got to the bathroom and ran a towel between her legs. And there, with a towel between her legs, the idea came:

I think that it was in that position, as I ran a towel between my legs, that I first thought I ought to tell all about it.

Stage two was a period of three or four years when contact became rarer and mostly of this frustrating kind, and when she spent long hot Paris summers alone. Digging through a drawer she found the Japanese dildo — the two-speed one with the doll’s head at one end and the “wild boar” clitoral attachment with an extremely long tongue — and came instantly, in a single long measurable spasm, without fantasy, without delivery-boys, without any of her inherited inner cast:

So an orgasm – an orgasm of the purest quality, even – could be achieved without perpetually having to return to that source, the thrill of the ‘first time’, by recreating various first times, and without even having time to convene my mental repertoire of delivery boys and workmen. I very often wept after these speedy sessions.

The irony of it — the most public sexual life in Paris undone and re-opened by solitary mechanical pleasure — wasn’t lost on her. It was in this period, laughing to herself, that she first thought of a title:

One time I thought to myself that if I was going to have to speak out about ‘the truth of the situation’, the book should be called The Sexual Life of Catherine M. It made me laugh all by myself.

The final anecdote of the section is a small portrait of Julien, her dentist — an unbilled artist of double rooms. He had designed and decorated a surgery with two waiting rooms and two treatment rooms connected by a door, so that while dressings dried on one patient he could slip next door, caress Millet (or one of his other girlfriends, or a combination), get himself half-hard against her, tidy his dick away, vanish through the door, and come back to continue. He usually ejaculated almost as soon as he’d penetrated. He played tennis at a high level, decorated his own surgery late into the evening, booked her rooms in five-star hotels for fifteen-minute visits and left her the money to check out. She was fond of him. What she recognised, under the comedy, was a sympathy of temperament:

I identified with him to some extent, because I never stopped and as soon as I was in one place I wanted to be somewhere else, to see what was on the other side of the wall.

Part 1 closes with a walker’s aphorism that gathers the whole argument of the chapter into a single image. On a walk she hates returning by the same route. She studies maps to find a new way to a piece of countryside. When she went to Australia — the furthest point on the globe from her front door — she noticed that the feeling of that distance was exactly the feeling of having no sexual barriers. Then, almost as a question to herself: might parenthood belong to the same family of emotions? The sentence has no answer. It opens a door and the chapter ends with her standing in the frame, Éric’s phrase floating up beside her — what mattered was “to widen the available space.”

Block 5: Space — The Gates of Paris, Open Air

Part 2 opens: an art critic’s frame

Having spent the first part of the book counting, Millet now turns to mapping. The shift is announced with the cool deflection of the professional: she opens Part 2 not with a body but with a bibliography. She wonders, in the register of a magazine column, why eminent art historians like André Chastel and Giulio Carlo Argan drifted over their careers from the analysis of pictorial space into the analysis of real architectural space, and she proposes that if she had not encountered certain twentieth-century artists she might herself have taken the same path. The artists she lists are the ones who treat space as a substance to be handled — Barnett Newman’s vast coloured fields (“I declare space”), Yves Klein’s “radiant blues” and his self-appointed title of “painter of space,” and Alain Jacquet’s topological objects juxtaposing “paradoxical abysses.” Her characterisation of what these works do is unexpected and, once uttered, governs everything that follows in the chapter:

What characterises these works is not the fact that they open space up, but that they both open and seal it — Newman with his closing zips, Klein by crushing his anthropometric forms, Jacquet by binding the ends of a Mobius ring. If you allow yourself to be lead, it’s like the boundless inner surface of a lung.

Space, then, is not a void to be walked through. It is a membrane — turned inside out, closed back on itself, simultaneously infinite and interior. It is the reader’s first warning that the terraces and car parks and tracks to come will be treated not as backdrops but as the very medium of the encounters that occur in them.

The Gates of Paris

The chapter descends from theory into the concrete with a single line of place-making: “The porte de Saint-Cloud car park borders onto the boulevard périphérique and in places is separated from it only by an open-work wall.” This is Millet’s register at its most characteristic — a sentence that could have been clipped from a guide to Parisian infrastructure, used to open a scene of being passed among a group of strangers. The reader is handed coordinates before anyone’s clothes come off, and the clothes, when they come off, come off with the same neutrality:

All I had on were my shoes, having slipped off my raincoat whose lining iced my skin before getting out of the car.

The scene that follows is rendered through its surfaces and sounds rather than through emotion. She is first pinned to a perpendicular wall by two men holding her up under the arms and legs while others take turns, and Éric’s line — that she was “nailed by their pricks, like a butterfly” — is allowed to do the work a less restrained writer might stretch over a paragraph. What interests her is how the traffic of the périphérique folds itself into the event: the cars are “so close they seemed to brush past us,” and she describes their thrumming as lulling her “into the same torpor I feel waiting at airports.” Her body has been reduced, by her own account, to a pelvis against which men hammer; the breezeblocks dig into her shoulders and hips; the headlights of passing cars sweep over her half-closed eyes. When she is moved from the wall and laid onto a coat spread across the bonnet of a car, the composition adjusts: she becomes, she writes, “the focal point for a theatre of shadows, invisible until the headlights of a car threw their insipid light over the scene.” The nearby truck is noted as “probably… chosen as a makeshift screen.”

From Saint-Cloud the chapter moves south-west to a little municipal stadium at Vélizy-Villacoublay, and here a different mood takes over — something closer to absurdity than to torpor. The convoy has driven so long, and the leader has been so mysterious about the destination, that arriving at the stadium “like a great clearing in the middle of a forest” simply produces a burst of laughter. She notes, with a kind of sociological patience, the embarrassment of their host:

Our guide responded to our questions by admitting that this had indeed been where he came for football training. He looked crestfallen, as if he had been forced to admit to a longstanding fantasy. Who hasn’t dreamed of polluting some ordinary and innocent place they know with a bit of nooky?

The group retreats under the sloping terraces — a move she analyses as a basic human reflex, because “it goes so against human nature to copulate in full view of the horizon or in too expansive a space.” The real barrier, she argues, is not a wall but a gaze: “we protect ourselves less from other people’s gazes which can constitute an even more definite barrier than their bodies.” She is taken standing up, hanging on to the posts under the terraces, dress lifted (she keeps it on because it is cold), and she notes with professional matter-of-factness the suitability of her anatomy — “Because I have a very supple waist, I am well suited to this position” — before settling into an image that captures the chapter’s whole atmosphere:

So this circle of joyful activity continued, forming a perimeter around my outstretched arse, while I gazed absently through the frame of floorboards to the empty pitch.

Afterwards, naked on the counter of a changing-room shed, she reaches for the register of stagecraft: the shed’s clean wooden walls and its awning over the counter read to her “like those theatre sets that set designers dream up that are like working drawings, far removed from reality.”

Out of these scenes she draws a short meditation on why so much of this happens at night. The obvious reason is logistical — public places are less guarded after dark — but she is more interested in a paradox of perception:

People also think that darkness protects them. But for some people, myself included, it at the same time opens the space around them up to infinity by making it limitless. The tall hedge a few metres away is no longer an obstacle.

She would prefer, she says, a total blackout, because it would let her experience “the pleasure of sinking into a sea of undifferentiated flesh,” and she notes that harsh light, once the eye has adjusted past its source, does something similar — it “dissolve[s] and blur[s] the frontiers of bodies.” The consequence is a small, startling line about her relationship to any hypothetical observer: “I, therefore, can’t even conceive that anyone is looking in from the outside.”

The section closes with a scene in the Bois de Vincennes — a half-hearted lawn at the edge of the forest, a bench under a street light, a walk after dinner that turns. She and Bruno try to shrink the space they occupy, not because they feel watched but because some mutual instinct of scale is at work. The passage that follows is one of the chapter’s oddest, because it stages the intrusion she has just said she cannot conceive of:

Suddenly, a second, powerful light came on in the distance, aimed towards us. For a moment, we froze expectantly, unable to identify exactly what this light was or where it was coming from.

Bruno’s response is to guide her head back to his lap. She completes the blow-job in the light, “with the black and gold splashes of light dancing before my eyes,” and they walk home afterwards sharing “an amused feeling of perplexity.” She never does find out what the light was — “A police car or a voyeur’s? Had a faulty floodlight come back on by itself? I never found an explanation for that perfectly focused light.” The scene is left with its mystery intact, which is how a geographer might leave an anomalous reading on a survey.

Open air

The second half of the chapter moves from the periphery of the city into the open country, and the register softens accordingly. She opens with an aphorism about herself:

If I heard anyone say of me ‘fucking comes to her as easily as breathing’, I would agree more than willingly because the expression could be taken literally.

The argument that follows is a small essay in cutaneous physiology. When the temperature of the air meets a patch of skin that is not usually exposed — “the small of the back” — “the body no longer presents an obstacle to the air, it is penetrated by it and is, therefore, more open, more receptive.” Her description of the vulva gorged by a passing wind, and of the “under-rated rut between the arsehole and the beginning of the cunt” feeling the air against it, arrives with the same unflustered tone, treated as data. The conclusion, characteristically, is generalised outward — away from her body and toward a map:

There must be a fairly general intrinsic link between the idea of moving in space, of travelling, and the idea of fucking, otherwise the widespread expression ‘having it away’ would not have been invented. Taking into account all these factors, terraces, roadsides, stretches of open country, and any space designed merely to be crossed, such as concourses and car parks, all of these are places (or non-places as Marc Augé calls them) where it feels good to me to follow their example and be open.

The first long set piece under this heading is a Midi garden above Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a sun terrace paved at the front of a villa, a low grey stone wall at the bottom of the garden and, a few metres below, a coastal road along which cars shuttle toward and from the cape. Her eye for the scene is the eye of a person who has flown over it — she notes that anyone overhead would have been amused by “the juxtaposition of contrasting scenes,” and elaborates the image with a small aerial essay on how motorways seam together the city’s “frantic streams of traffic” and the countryside’s emptiness so that the two “represent two conflicting things which know nothing of each other in an almost hostile way.” On the terrace itself, she and two summer acolytes (Judith, a lesbian friend whose body she describes as if enlarged by a pantograph, and another girl with heavy pendulous breasts above a tiny waist) hold court through the long afternoons. The most quoted image from the passage arrives when another girl climaxes so forcefully that “she burst a string of pearls with the pressure of her congested neck,” and Millet, watching, lets the incident prompt one of the book’s most exposed questions:

Nothing ever disturbed the unspooling of those compact segments of afternoon, their rhythm slowed further by the humming of the traffic absorbed into the buzzing of insects and, even though the clattering of those pearls on the ground was barely discernible and this girl in her rapture didn’t moan any louder than anyone else, I was surprised by such a transport of ecstasy. I started to think: ‘Can a woman really experience such overwhelming pleasure that her body undergoes this sort of external transformation?’

She confesses here that she has no picture of her own face in pleasure — she has “no image of [her] own body at such moments” — and that when she does catch herself in a mirror later she looks nothing like what she imagines. “If I can put it like this, these feelings didn’t take on a physical form, even less so in the suave pleasures of the open air.”

The chapter then becomes a small atlas of her and Jacques’s “couple culture” — his phrase, borrowed via her from the enterprise world. She and Jacques have coloured in a map of rural France with their stops: vineyard tracks and dead ends, ruined chapels, a fortified farm with its sacristy, the village of Latour-de-France viewed through her eyelashes from a position she describes with appreciative precision:

Now here is a position I really like: arching my back down to facilitate access to my pussy so that it can be well and truly hammered from behind while contemplating a wide panorama.

The passage that follows contains one of the chapter’s best pieces of looking. With her head hanging down she can see “into the darkened room of my body as it bends over itself” — her breasts swinging, the undulations of her stomach and, “at the end of the narrow gallery, where the light appears again, a little bit of the crumpled surface of his balls and, intermittently, the base of his member.” She notes, without flinching, that watching “the very short, very measured coming and going heightens my excitement as much as if not more than the movement itself.” Once her pleasure has reached its ceiling, her mind disengages and “hovers over and follows the contours of each hill, clearly distinguishing each from the next, and sinking into the inky magic of the mountains in the background.”

At Céret, arriving too early for dinner, the couple climbs a sandy track between walls of dark foliage, and through breaks in the leaves catches sight of “the overlapping expanses of rustic tiles” of the town below. The town, seen from its edge, is described with an architectural historian’s gaze:

You would think that the entire plain had been pushed by the sea like a vast barge, and had forced the town to huddle itself against the mountainside.

She sheds her bustier dress “in one swift movement as if sloughing off a skin,” and the scene ends in a position “quite a tiring… to maintain without any other support,” with her upper body “thrust forward over the Roussillon plain as it slowly dissolved.” The line of metaphor she lands on is botanical: the sensation, she says, is like those time-lapse shots from nature documentaries that show “the petals of a rose suffused with oxygen and methodically smoothing themselves out.”

Not every outdoor location is picturesque. The Mediterranean landscape where she and Jacques take to living for several weeks a year, she notes, “offer[s] hardly any hiding places and even fewer natural beds,” and she has “often had to hang onto the windowless door of an abandoned car or to the uprights at the opening to a pigsty, my rear end jutting out all the further as my eyes and nose struggled with the smell of putrefaction.” A favourite track of theirs — “now almost disappeared since we stopped using it” — is catalogued by its stations, each landmark rendered in the same deadpan detail. There is a sandy platform halfway up with an outcrop of curved rocks that look, when she chooses to imagine them, like “the backs of hippopotamuses breaking through the muddy waters of a river which also deposited dented old petrol cans and broken pallets.” There is a hairpin further up with a ditch that has become a local dumping ground — “the carcasses of agricultural machinery, the Cyclops heads of washing machines” — and opposite it a pale rock wall whose smooth face “comfortably accommodated the palms of my hands.” The affection in her description of these places is oddly moving, and her reason for liking the rubbish bend is tender: “we unconsciously liked to feel that our bodies came from the jumble around us.” She notes, too, without handkerchiefs or leaves, she would stay turned to her rock a moment afterwards, “watching the cum falling from my pussy onto the ground in a lazy drool the same whitish colour as the rocks.”

The chapter ends with a pair of conclusions that braid its threads together. She observes that within a couple each person brings their own fantasies, and that these “cross the barrier between dream and reality without losing any of their intensity” — group sex was the form through which her own obsession fused with Claude’s and Éric’s, while with Jacques the shared practice is open-air and photographic. The second conclusion is more interesting geographically:

Natural spaces do not feed the same fantasies as urban spaces. Because the latter is by definition a social space, it is a territory in which we express a desire to transgress codes with our exhibitionist/voyeuristic impulses; it presupposes the presence of others, of fortuitous looks to penetrate the aura of intimacy which emanates from a partially naked body or from two bodies soldered together. Those same bodies out under the clouds, with only God as their witness, are looking for the opposite sensation; not to make others come into the pocket of air in which their rapid breathing mingles, but, thanks to their Edenic solitude, to let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see.

The city produces one kind of fantasy (she provides a sample — a packed Métro car, a stranger’s flies, the carriage dividing into factions of the aroused and the offended), the country another. But at night, she adds, cities acquire some of the country’s expansiveness, and she remembers walking ahead of Claude through their suburb with her skirt lifted over her naked buttocks — not an invitation and not a provocation, but a way “to breathe in the road around me, a cool balm for my quivering crack.” The chapter’s final image folds its whole geographical project back into a single proposition about her temperament: the men of the trees and car parks, she suggests, “by their sheer numbers and their shadowy nature, [might not] be made of the same substance as space.” She has, she adds, an unrivalled sense of direction, and wonders whether her aptitude for passing from man to man in a group might belong to the same family of faculties.

Block 6: Different Towns, On the Threshold

Different towns, different men

For Millet, the erotic life and the cartographic one are never quite separable; to move is to want, and to want is, very often, to move. She places the impulse at the source of her first adult years: “Throughout the first few years of my adult life, my sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need to escape. That need even instigated them. It was when I ran away from home for the first time that I lost my virginity.” The scene is almost comically prosaic — an argument at the family apartment, Claude ringing the bell, a Renault 4 that keeps driving until it has reached Dieppe — yet she catches, in that first flight, the mechanism that will govern decades of subsequent movement: the border crossed, the bed found on the other side.

The pattern duplicates itself immediately. A student from Berlin, chaste but adored for the “long sturdy frame of his body lying next to mine and his big white hands”, prompts a second escape: another Claude, another Renault 4, a failed crossing at the East-West German checkpoint for want of papers, and a break-up staged, with characteristic bathos, in

a cafeteria in a huge car park in the middle of a forest, amidst queues of people and queues of cars waiting to pass the wooden sentry boxes.

Millet, ever the essayist, pauses to inspect the tendency and finds it was not simply romantic restlessness but something closer to a research protocol — shared, informally, between her and her small cohort of libertine friends. “The unspoken law expected the pioneering scout to tell about their adventures on their return.” The going-away weekend with a barely known man, the years-long arrangement with a colleague in Milan — these were expeditions undertaken for the journey as much as for what lay at the end of it. She writes, and the sentence wants to be read slowly:

If it had been possible, I would have liked to have woken up each morning to the shadows of an as yet unexplored ceiling and to have climbed out of the sheets and stayed for a few moments in the no man’s land of an apartment in which I had forgotten overnight which corridor led to the bathroom. At times like that, it is the other body that you leave behind, a body you may have known only a few hours, but which during those hours has nourished you with its solid presence and its smell, it is that body which provides you with the ineffable well-being of familiarity.

Here the travel fantasy dovetails with the more persistent one she has confessed to elsewhere — the dream life of the high-class whore, in which exactly this sequence (strange ceiling, half-remembered corridor, borrowed body) becomes the structural condition of the day. And the journey itself, before any arrival, already belongs to the same economy of sensation:

As for the journey itself, the lapse of time we inhabit when we are no longer in one place but not yet in another, can be a source of pleasure measured on the same scale as erotic pleasure. In a taxi when all the bustle that precedes departure suddenly falls away, or descending into that semi-conscious state while waiting at an airport, I can sometimes feel that instantly recognisable sensation of a giant hand which from inside my body, squeezes my entrails and draws from them a sensuous delight which irrigates my every extremity, exactly like when a man looks at me in a way which implies he has me in his sights.

It is a startling equivalence — the departure lounge and the male gaze producing the same internal grip — and it organises what she writes next: an admission that, despite her long career of professional travel, she has not harvested lovers from it. “I fucked infinitely less when my timetable was more flexible than it is in Paris.” On reflection, she can remember only two men met in transit who became, even briefly, lovers.

She offers two explanations. The first turns on a distaste that surprises her. A more experienced female colleague, early in her career, had initiated her into the folklore of the conference circuit — “symposia, seminars and other meetings held in seclusion with people who were temporarily cut from their ties were God-given opportunities for furtive comings and goings up and down hotel corridors” — and it had shocked her, precisely to the extent that holiday clothing shocks her, as a sign of something shapeless, provisional, beneath the dignity of a life. “If this thing were only permitted when certain conditions were met, at pre-determined times, well then it was carnival!” She allows herself, in parenthesis, to complicate the judgement with a confession that she has frequently masturbated to the exact scenario she disapproves of — being “a spunk bag for a group of stressed executives at a meeting”, each depositing his load “secretly, at the back of a hotel bar, even in a phone box, with the receiver in one hand as they carried on their ritual conversation with their wife”. The “pleasing antinomy” between her moral position and her fantasy life is laid out on the page with the evenness of a museum label.

The two actual episodes are rendered briefly. The first, across Canada, with a fair-haired assistant who waits until the end of the trip to knock on her door in the morning: “He pushed his hips calmly. I let him get on with it without much conviction, but I encouraged him almost as a professional would, choosing however a vocabulary that was more amorous than obscene.” They continue to work together, the episode never repeats, and she registers it as “the only time in my life that I vaguely regretted a sexual act.”

The second is more luminous. In Rio she meets an artist versed in her corner of French cultural history; years pass in irregular contact; in São Paulo, after a Biennale party, they share a taxi, and she decides without a word:

Without taking my eyes off the taxi-driver’s neck, I drummed my fingers lightly on his thigh. He gave the address of his hotel. The bed stood by a bay window and street signs outside threw blocks of yellow light across it as in a Hopper painting. He did not cover me, he sowed parts of his body like gentle seeds over mine, reassuring himself that I was there with his hands, his lips, his penis, as well as his forehead, his chin, his shoulders and legs.

A migraine ends the night; there is no second occasion. Later, in a Paris taxi years afterwards, watching him talk, she understands what makes the memory exact:

I was thinking about the geographical distance between us, the long intervals of time between our meetings which were nevertheless regular — sometimes, when in Rio, I might just give him a quick call; and I thought of that single occasion when time and space had come together, and their union had formed a perfect architecture.

The second explanation for her scarcity of travel-lovers returns her to a thesis she set out at the start of the book: she preferred to discover with a guide. A man introduced her to other men; the libidinal initiative belonged, almost always, to the social fabric rather than to her own searching. Alone in a foreign city she was a dreamer — “a gifted fabulist” — and desire could sit at a distance from contact without any sense of deprivation. Copulation, she insists, “answered to a wider necessity: to carve a smooth path for myself in the world.” The stranger’s city, without introductions, offers no such complicity.

What she does bring back from these travels, compulsively, are the rooms. “With many men, it is their houses that I remember before anything else.” The memory is architectural before it is amorous; she has, she concedes, opened her eyes as often as her legs.

Where my most intimate slit has given access, I have opened my eyes wide too.

Paris, she learned young, could be mapped through the beds one visited: an architect’s top-floor pied-à-terre on the rue Saint-Jacques (“the view from the bed dived straight into the sky”); her own place in the rue Saint-Martin on the opposite bank; a dentist friend’s mistress near the Invalides, a former 1950s variety singer with the “bland and restrained appeal of vinyl covers of the period” and low tables cluttered with porcelain tortoises, from whose window Millet could “gaze … at the sublime proportions of the buildings along the esplanade”. Each apartment organised its own erotics: Eric’s bed as “the dispatching centre of a kaleidoscope of camera lenses, screens and mirrors”; Bruno’s Mondrian-modelled studio, a single vase of flowers anchoring a space “where the door jambs, the beams, the frames of the cupboards and the furniture all seemed to be one continuous unit … as if the big dining table, for example, was merely an elevated replica of the bed.”

And then Italy, which she addresses with a fondness she does not quite extend elsewhere:

I carry in me a sweet nostalgia for large apartments in Italian cities.

Enzo’s Rome comes first — an ochre building in some outlying district, separated from its neighbours by “dodgy spaces”, as though the urbanism itself were feudal, “dictating that each building should be able to project its entire shadow onto the ground in the evening.” The rooms larger than French rooms of comparable rank; the bathroom echoing; the floor tiling “so clean that it made it all the easier to appreciate the full extent of the space, as if someone had just finished buffing it in honour of our visit.” When Enzo moves to Milan the scale enlarges again — older buildings, higher ceilings, the apartment emptied of furniture. She remembers it with a sensuous gratitude:

It was such a pleasure wandering around it with nothing on, as pristine as the fresh paint on the walls, as true to myself as the bedroom, furnished with only a bed and an open suitcase! Pulling off my sweater and letting my skirt slip to the floor caused a movement of air which aroused my entire body.

On the threshold

The case for reading her sex-life as a long essay on spatial mastery becomes literal when she discloses the cramped origin. “I was born into a family of five living in a three-room apartment. And it was the first time I escaped the place that I fucked for the first time.” The causal sentence is followed, almost at once, by the sociological note — children of better-off families, where “individual intimacy is at least respected”, or country children walking to school, “may not have had the same experience”:

Whereas I had to cover geographical distances to reach parts of myself. I had to go from Paris to Dieppe in a Renault 4 and to sleep facing the sea to learn that somewhere in a part of me that I could not see and that I had not imagined I had an opening, a cavity that was so supple and so deep that the extension of flesh that meant a boy was a boy, and I was not, could be accommodated there.

She lingers on her belated “innocence”. At twelve, the arrival of her periods produces household panic and a father who pokes his head round the door to ask, laughing, “whether I had a nose bleed.” Her anatomical grasp is so approximate that she cannot distinguish between the passages through which urine and menstrual blood travel. A doctor, examining her, sniffs his latex-covered finger and suggests more thorough washing. A scandal at a rock concert — girls reportedly seizing policemen’s truncheons — produces the confused question: “Stuck them up where? And why exactly would they want truncheons?”

Meanwhile, an infantile onanism runs in parallel, unconnected, she insists, to any theory of adult sex. She describes the mechanics with the same taxonomic care she brings to rooms. As a small girl, dolls in her lap:

I would gather the crotch of my knickers into a thick strip of fabric and wedge it into the cleft between my legs right up to my buttocks, and I would sit down so that the fabric dug into me slightly. In that position, I would take the tiny concave hand of a celluloid baby Ken doll and let it roam over a naked Barbie.

Later, dolls dropped, the same frictional knot of fingers, and — a crucial spatial fact — a shared bed. Her mother, estranged from her father, had moved into the children’s bedroom, so that the twelve-year-old’s self-pleasure took place inches from a sleeping adult who would sometimes turn, sometimes shake her awake with the verdict “dirty little girl”. Hence a paradox she notes with some dry pride:

What a paradox that I should have been forced to acquire such dexterity to give myself pleasure while barely moving or breathing so that my mother, who touched me when she turned over, wouldn’t feel me quivering!

Imagination, she proposes, may have been developed by precisely this enforced stillness — the body hunched, almost paralysed, the mind compensating with crowded scenes. Dieppe, she writes, was the first unfolding: “at the same time as opening up my body, I learned to uncurl it.”

From there she moves toward the central figure of this block — the threshold. Space, she says, “rarely opens up to us in one go.” Even in the theatre a curtain can stick, the mechanism resist, “some occult resistance” deferring the spectator’s entry by a few seconds; we attach, she suggests, “special importance to the times of transition and the places in which they took place.” The airport lounge, in which she first located her visceral pleasure of transit, turns out to echo the doorway she passed through at seventeen, when she stepped out of her parents’ apartment into Claude’s car. And yet the threshold can betray:

But space is only ever an immeasurably large balloon with a hole. If you blow it up too fast, it will readily turn on you and deflate just as quickly.

Two front-door scenes arrive in succession and do most of the chapter’s work. The first is the “primal scene” she witnesses at thirteen or fourteen — walking along the corridor she catches sight of her mother

on the threshold of our front door with the friend who used to come and see her when my father was away. They were exchanging a slight kiss, but her eyes were closed and her back was arched. I took it badly. She took the fact that I took it badly badly.

The second completes the rhyme. Three or four years later she sees Claude “framed in the same doorway”. It is June; they drive to Dieppe; they fail to see well enough to pitch the tent on arrival; Claude, fortified by an exam-season amphetamine, offers her one too. The loss of virginity in the tent is reported in quiet, exact paragraphs: the uncertainty about whether her trembling belongs to the drug or to the act; the months of prior confusion after some petting that convinced her, for a long time, that she was pregnant; her almost childlike stipulation — that he would have to say her name — and his obliging of it.

I told Claude that I would say yes if he asked me the question again and used my name. He can’t have been expecting that sort of demand and willingly said ‘Catherine’ several times. When he withdrew I was scarcely aware of a fine brown thread along the top of my thigh.

The day after is a cocoon-scene — the tent as the smallest, most provisional of rooms, the neighbours heard through canvas:

There was a family in a nearby tent. I heard the wife asking irritably: ‘But what the hell are they up to in there? Aren’t they ever going to come out?’ and the man calmly replying: ‘Leave it! They’re tired. They’re resting.’

And when she emerges, she registers, as always, the architecture: “the beach and the campsite which was set slightly back were cut right across by a cliff perpendicular to the sea.”

Looking back, she reinterprets what seemed a flight as a rehearsal:

Our frolicking in the tent seemed like kids’ games. They remind me of the way I used to hide from adults by pulling my sheet up over my head, creating the confined but vital space of a little house of my own.

From which she draws the more general law she has been circling all along — that the pleasure of the forbidden, enacted under thin cover (a tent wall, a bit of foliage, a ring of human accomplices), belongs less to exhibitionism than to its opposite:

Succumbing to a forbidden activity in a place regulated by communal laws, poorly protected by a thin or flawed screen, by a bit of foliage, even by a wall of human accomplices, derives — at least in part — from the same playful spirit. It represents an elementary mechanism of transgression which, paradoxically, belongs less to extroversion than to introversion; you don’t make an exhibition of yourself, you turn in on your intimate pleasure, pretending to ignore the fact that it might accidentally erupt in front of spectators who are not prepared for it and might even stop it.

The child under the sheet and the adult at the edge of a campsite turn out to share a geometry. The threshold, for Millet, is always double: it is the place where the small private space meets the large public one, and the place where the self — held in, hunched, practised at silence — learns, finally, to uncurl.

Block 7: Confined Space — Havens, Illness and Dirt

Part 3 turns the camera inward. The open fields and parking lots recede; what follows are enclosures — vans, truck cabs, train couchettes, stairwells, peep-show kiosks, squalid apartments, and finally the sickbed itself. The logic of the section is that of an inversion: the smaller the space, the more dense the experience, and the more directly the body registers everything it contains, including what normally gets scrubbed out of erotic writing — vomit, shit, grime, migraine, the slow rot of a man’s teeth. Millet narrates these with the same level register she gave the outdoor orgies. Nothing is elevated and nothing is flinched from.

A variety of havens

The section opens with an inventory of hiding places. A Ville de Paris municipal van, parked a stone’s throw from the Soviet Embassy, becomes the first of them. The men come in one by one, the rear door lifts at intervals, a silhouette slips in, another slips out. The metal floor is ridged and painful, but the discomfort doesn’t undo the trance — it deepens it:

I could have hidden there all night, not stiffened so much because of my uncomfortable position but rather dulled and lulled by the atmosphere of my unlikely haven where I curled up and sunk, like in those opaque dreams, watching myself go deeper… In that creaky little vehicle I was like a motionless idol accepting the homage of a suite of followers.

The image is worth pausing on. An idol — still, enshrined, passive-but-central. She leaves before the queue is through, not from revulsion but from Éric’s logistical report: the men are getting aggressive, the van is threatening to keel over.

The trucker cabs she prefers are judged on furniture. “The cabs of articulated trucks suit much better, mainly because they are equipped with a couchette.” She notes, with the observational care of someone who has watched from the ground, the small athletic hop a roadside prostitute must make to reach the first step; she knows “that impulsion the body needs and the brief subsequent ascension which carries that body up to two solid blokes who greet it delicately, accustomed as they are to limit their movements in the restricted cab.” Her advantages over the working girl: no price to name, no cold to wait in, no outfit to budget for — a coat thrown over nothing, “which would fall open like a dressing-gown on the way up.” In one International Art Transport truck near the porte D’Auteuil, one of the two drivers handled her “at great length,” kissed her on the mouth, went on fondling her after he came; the other adjusted the rear-view mirror, then turned away. “It got late, we chatted; it was a very convivial situation.”

From the truck cab she glides to the childhood logic of couchettes. On a strike-bound train back from Venice, she and Jacques share a top bunk in a compartment otherwise occupied by a family of strangers. They wait for the lights to go out; they fuck without speaking, without moving — only the imperceptible contraction of his buttocks, rolling the hips so faintly that the other sleepers cannot register it. The passage contains one of her most definitive sentences on the architecture of desire:

Anyone who has been constrained to seize their pleasure in unwanted promiscuity (in a boarding school dormitory, a small family home…) knows what I am talking about: if you achieve your pleasure, then it will have absorbed the utter silence and the near paralysis of the bodies which were its preconditions, and it will have been the more intense for them. Understandably, people then try to recreate this form of promiscuity in more or less artificial ways, and some try to achieve it by choosing the most unexpected and public nooks and crannies.

This is the thesis of the section in a single stroke: the adult’s taste for public, improvised, cramped sex is the grown echo of the child’s enforced silence. The constraint is not the price of the pleasure — the constraint is the pleasure. She also registers, on that same couchette, an unexpected panic: not that the adults in the compartment would disapprove, but that the children might sense what was happening. She had been the child once, hiding from her own mother’s clandestine gestures; now the roles have swapped, and she discovers that “the sense of decency” she had as a girl remains intact in her. Twice she came close to letting the children of her lovers walk in. Both times she sided, retrospectively, with “the rebuffed child.”

A short interlude on motorbikes — the precise moment of being “snatched” by the in-draught when overtaking a lorry — sets up her general theory of space: you are by turns the subject that seizes its environment and the object seized by it. She brings this formulation into the sex-shop, where, wandering while Éric quizzes the clerk about new video releases, she leafs through shrink-wrapped magazines with the detachment of a commuter at a newsstand. The spread-legged models, the bodybuilders in G-strings, the cartoon splatters “outside the margins of a comic” — every image, without exception, produces “that characteristic enervation deep between my thighs.” The comedy of the scene is in its civility:

Isn’t it wonderful that you can be aroused so freely, in full sight and full knowledge of all the other customers doing the same thing, even though each of them behaves as if they are searching through the display stands of their local newsagent?

She fantasises, in her driest mode, a utopia in which every general store would carry this sort of merchandise and the quiet politeness of the sex-shop would diffuse through ordinary life. “‘Excuse me, could I borrow your paper?’ ‘Oh, please do.’ Etc.”

Through the curtain, the peep-show kiosk — a void of darkness lit only by a blue reef-glow from the central stage, coins slotted to raise the screen, “unbelievably slow contortions” performed within. The stage is almost incidental. What matters is that the kiosk reduces the visible world, for her, to “this section of wrinkled flesh dotted with hairs, which I swallow rhythmically.” When Éric leaves to change a banknote, unfamiliar hands take over her exposed buttocks and she cannot tell whose they are; the hands, the buttocks, and the figures on stage all seem equally distant. She records, with characteristic analytical poise, the difference between a peep-show and porn on television: the TV set “blurs boundaries so that the space they delineate becomes almost an extension of the space you are in,” while the kiosk window is “a hiatus which substantiates the separation between the two symmetrical parts.” Also: the kiosk has a timer, which the television does not.

The havens section closes with stairwells. Adolescents, she notes, rarely have a bedroom of their own; their first erotic lives are transacted on doorsteps and landings, among the light switches nobody uses. The body’s education happens in the corridors of the polite world:

The sexual instinct that civilisation has made secret finds its first spontaneous expression not behind a closed bedroom door but in places we pass through, that belong to everyone and where courtesy reaches its peak of reserve: ‘Good morning. Good evening. I’m so sorry. After you…’ Etc. The number of times I have had a breast mauled by clumsy hands in the exact spot where my neighbour usually holds the door for me.

She and Henri, out late with Claude and ostensibly looking for a friend’s apartment to barge into, settle instead onto “the threadbare mat” at the bottom of a staircase, facing the lift. The light is on a timer. She sucks him, the light goes out, she keeps working; the light comes back on, “suspending my progress,” and her heart hammers. “The blaze of light whipped my forehead to make me suck more quickly.” She proposes, in passing, a miniature etiquette of fucking: partners take turns devoting themselves to the other’s body, “just like two people exchanging thanks or desultory compliments in a one-upmanship of unselfish attention.” The precision of the analogy is the joke and the argument at once.

Illness, dirt

The section transitions on a single observation: every confined space where the body has found pleasure “inversely proportional to the available space” reawakens a nostalgia for the foetal state. And where else does the body abandon itself most completely? In the closet. She notes, deadpan, that WCs did not become private for hygienic reasons — the pretext is modesty, but the real cause is “the freedom to experience the pleasures of defecation without any restraint, to inhale our own embalming stench or even to examine our stools meticulously, taking a lead from Salvador Dali who left descriptions rich with comparisons and images.” Having disposed of the decorative reading, she warns she is not going to tell scatological stories. What follows is not pornography of dirt but a careful ledger of “dubious struggles between pleasure and displeasure, enjoyment and pain.”

She suffers from migraines. The first episode lands in Casablanca: she’s flown in, sweated in the airport, been driven out by Basile to a track off the road. Crouched on all fours on the back seat, she feels the first aura — “sort of flashes which accentuate the fluttering effect of the light” — as a “sharp prick” takes her from behind. By the end, the body has been reduced to two poles:

My body – with the exception of my arse – has ceased to exist, emptied of its substance like a piece of fruit left to shrivel, crumbling in the glimmering light. Or, to be more precise, there is nothing left between my head which has been turned to stone by the vice-like grip of pain, and the skin on my buttocks where the last few caresses linger.

Then nausea joins the migraine. She collapses onto a bed at the architect’s holiday village, unable to peel the sweat-soaked sheet off her skin, breathing her own dissipated vomit because any other perception hurts more. From this collapsed state comes one of the book’s more vertiginous fantasies: she wishes Jacques would photograph her — eye-sockets hollowed by grey, the flesh between eyelid and nose pinched — and that the photographs would be published and seen “by people who read my books and articles.” The degeneration isn’t to be hidden; it should “close the circle” by being inscribed on the gaze of others. With Basile she can be ill in front of him because the tone between them was always light and playful; she had already, after a good meal, let her “bulging tummy express a few farts” while he took her from behind. That earlier frankness underwrites this one. She can now “offer him the spectacle of myself indulging in the complete negation of my being.”

A second episode: the young couple in the bungalow outside Paris, too much champagne, the half-remembered migration from one bedroom to the other because the hostess Christine “had gone into the bathroom” and didn’t return. She allows Lucien to take her “apathetically,” the eiderdown “a deep chasm,” her vagina “softening and sinking, drawn into that great depth.” Four or five times in the night she climbs naked out of bed, crosses the kitchen, stands in the pouring rain in the middle of the garden alley and vomits onto the ground “not looking for somewhere to hide.” The rain anaesthetises, briefly. Each spasm converts the blacksmith’s hammer in her skull “into something that felt like a final disintegration of the beaten piece of metal.” The morning after, once the medicine has arrived, Lucien informs her that he had fucked her several times during the night and that she had seemed to enjoy it. “It is one of the rare situations when I was not conscious of what I was doing.” A coda arrives a few months later: the young woman survives a car crash that kills her boyfriend, is turned out by his family, comes to see Catherine; she feels genuine compassion and, simultaneously, “a strange feeling that this was just the continuation of a nightmare.”

The third episode is the one she approaches most carefully — a meal of questionable freshness, an upset stomach, and Lucien’s insistence on taking her from behind despite her efforts to redirect him with “a fervent fellation”:

I couldn’t stop him delving his fingers right up close to the part of me that was sick, and I realised to my shame that they brought out a small amount of liquid matter. He buried his dick in there. The pleasure that this particular use of the rectum gives is obviously in the same family as that experienced in the seconds before the expulsion of faecal matter, but in this case the conjugation of the two was so narrow that it bordered on torture.

She names the limit: she has never taken part in scatological games, not voluntarily and not at the encouragement of men experienced in them. The men with whom such incidents occurred were always much older, father-figured in one way or another. When Lucien withdrew he went to wash himself and told her she had been silly to make a fuss, because it had been so good. “I felt I could trust him.”

She stops the sequence to formulate what these states share with ordinary erotic expansion. There is a well-being in leaving the body behind through pleasure; there is an uncanny echo of that well-being in leaving the body behind through abjection or pain. The difference is that one is excitement — “the rising tide of desire waiting for a response from the outside world” — and the other is not. But both involve the body ceasing to occupy ordinary space. Vomiting, shitting, bleeding out of one’s own pores — these are not excitements but they are exteriorisations:

If there is any pleasure in this, it is not that the body feels struck by something greater than itself, it is that it feels bottomless, as if by exteriorising the activities of our entrails we could accede to our entire surroundings.

The section’s final movement is a portrait, and the portrait is of filth. She maintains, for years, a relationship with a man who lives in two minute rooms entirely swallowed by collapsing shelves of books and records, the bed permanently unmade under “books, papers and newspapers,” the desk sacked as if by a disappointed burglar — and beyond disorder, actual grime:

It was not only the desk which looked as if it had suffered the revenge of a burglar furious not to have found what he was looking for, but also the floor; it was covered with a maze of crumbling piles of books and catalogues, heaps of opened envelopes and crumpled paper… This along with the dust would have been nothing if it hadn’t been for the glasses with the dried brown mark of long-forgotten drinks used as paperweights, if they hadn’t left their slimy circular imprint on other pieces of paper, if a greyish T-shirt or a stiffened face towel hadn’t been jumbled into the bed sheets, if – when you wanted to locate a bar of soap in the sink – you didn’t have to search through archaeological layers of cups and saucers encrusted with crumbs, like the mud still attached to recently exhumed relics … all of that made you heave.

The man never brushed his teeth. When he laughed, “his upper lip raised the curtain on a yellow plaster dotted with black patches.” She wondered what level of amnesia he had achieved about his own childhood. He was, in daily life, an aesthete and a theorist with “a rather precious turn of phrase” — which makes the dissonance more useful to her, not less. He liked being finger-fucked. He would put himself on all fours, face serious, and wait. She describes her own posture at work — “my frenetic arm movements I must have looked very like a housewife desperately trying to stop a sauce curdling, or someone proudly polishing up their DIY achievement” — with the domestic analogy dropped in at exactly the point another writer would reach for something sacerdotal. Her friends asked her about him. She answered without defence: “‘Well, yes, I go just as I am now – freshly showered and in clean knickers – and rub myself up against that filth.’ Or if need be: ‘I rub myself against him just like I’m cuddling up to you.’”

She then works through the obvious diagnosis — self-abasement, the perverse intention of degrading the other — and refuses to leave it there. The refusal is the section’s closing position. Fucking past disgust is not only a way of lowering oneself; it is also, in the opposite direction, a way of “raising yourself above all prejudice.” Others break taboos as powerful as incest. Her own freedom is the narrower one of not choosing: not the sex of her partners, not their moral or physical qualities, not their hygiene. She has, with “full knowledge,” had sex with men who were spineless and stupid, men who did not wash. (She has still not been under “a trained dog,” though Éric has kept promising.) The section ends with a single image that answers the earlier motorbike figure. On long-haul flights, she likes to look out over the Gobi or the stretches of Siberia — and the feeling of wonderment, she says, is all the greater when she is shackled not so much by her seat belt as by the “soupy bath” of musty armpits and overheated feet exchanged among the passengers. Vastness is sharper from inside squalor. The two poles of the book — open space and confined space, the lyrical and the fetid — meet, without a sentimentality, in an airplane cabin somewhere over central Asia.

Block 8: In the Office, Taboos, Trusting

In the office

Part 3 has been building a typology of spaces, and it closes where most of Millet’s waking life actually happened: the office. She works in art publishing; the buildings on boulevard Saint-Germain and the rue de Rennes are, by day, places of deadlines and page proofs. By evening — or in the interstices — they become something else. She names the impulse plainly: “my habit of completing the sexual act in a maximum number of places of my familiar space.” The kitchen table and the landing are part of this catalogue, but offices sit at the top of the hierarchy, because “here intimate space and public space meet.”

The first office memory is almost a tableau. A friend lets himself be sucked off in front of a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the rue de Rennes, Millet kneeling and silhouetted, the traffic churning below. She notices her own pleasure is amplified by the view:

In cities, deprived of distant horizons, I like being able to look out from a window or balcony while I keep a languorous dick captive in a secret place.

From another office on the boulevard Saint-Germain she used to contemplate the facade of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while similarly occupied. The exhibitionist charge she has mentioned before is only part of it. There is also, she says, something more primitive — the urge to mark territory:

Like a lemur which marks out its chosen space with a few jets of urine, you leave a few drops of cum on a staircase or the office carpet, you impregnate the store-room where everyone hangs up their coats. By inscribing this terrain with the act in which a body exceeds its limits, you appropriate it for yourself by osmosis. And you take it from others.

She is honest about the aggression in this. The coworkers are discreet and tolerant; that is precisely what makes the breach satisfying. A forgotten sweater becomes a cushion; a hand towel in the staff toilets becomes a private rag. She has felt “more at home” in certain offices than the people who actually worked there, because she had left “the damp outline of my buttocks in the place devoted to their work and their files.” She even consoles herself with the thought that those colleagues might be doing the same thing in reverse: “that we were fucking in each other’s wake.”

Two particular rooms get the darkroom-and-storeroom treatment. The photographic darkroom, closed off by a blackout curtain, is so small that one has to stay standing, “bathed in cabaret-like light” that makes pale skin look velvet and transparent, darker areas swallowed whole. The windowless paper-storerooms of a newspaper, by contrast, present the opposite problem — too uniform, too arbitrary:

The area carved up into parallel alleys by the shelving is perfectly uniform, you are no less sheltered from intruders in one alley than another… you settle in this place of accumulation as arbitrarily as you would in an empty space.

In these grim alleys she preferred fellatio — the act easiest to interrupt — because there was nothing aesthetic or playful about hiding there. “If we are happy to contemplate being caught in flagrante delicto in a picturesque setting, there would be something almost humiliating about being caught in somewhere as ugly as that.”

The deserted office after hours, though, is a different matter — a suspended rather than ended state, tools and monitors and files still threatening to resume. There is a quieter observation tucked in about her working life:

All the tools, all the materials and all the space at my disposal – and mine alone – give me the illusory but calming impression that I have an unlimited capacity for work… as if the very fact that I can go into an office without having to introduce myself or apologise smoothes out my fitful, halting life.

Then it turns technical again. Worktops, not carpets, were her preferred platforms, and not because a tabletop is easier to modify if someone bursts in. It was because the choreography flowed. Standing beside Vincent over page-layout dummies, she would turn, hop up, and “with my buttocks next to the dummies, my pubis was at the right level. And the level matters.” She notes which desks were the wrong height and were therefore never used twice. One graphic designer she went to see had solved the problem with pedestal chairs whose seat could be adjusted to the nearest centimetre — she would sit on his, he stood with his feet on a table behind, and he rolled his waist “as if he were turning a hula hoop,” intermittently substituting his own movement with that of the chair seat, swinging it fluidly from side to side.

Taboos

The word is hers, but her account of what is actually off-limits is narrower — and stranger — than one might expect from someone who has just spent two hundred pages describing group sex in car parks. She begins by stating plainly that she has rarely worried about being caught, because “the risk is almost always calculated, limited by implicit conventions.” A veteran of the Bois could map the zones in her head; she has hardly ever used offices during working hours. And she holds a baseline faith about public exposure: an involuntary witness would be “sufficiently confused by his own impulses to show no reaction.”

Then the real taboo, when it comes, is domestic and specific:

I fear only those that I know too well, not the anonymous who mean nothing to me… In this area, the taboo for me would be to use the home that you share with someone else, while that person was out and unaware of what was going on.

She tells the story behind this rule. Early one afternoon, Claude — her partner at the time — came home to their new apartment and walked into the spare bedroom near the front door, interrupting Millet and Paul mid-coitus. Paul, his back filling the door frame and his naked buttocks “proportionately so small,” followed Claude out. Through the door she heard him say: “I’m sorry, old man.” Claude never mentioned it again. Millet carried guilt for a very long time. At least, she notes, the spare room was “relatively neutral territory.” The “conjugal” bed was absolutely not:

Our shared bedroom, the ‘conjugal’ bed was absolutely out of bounds. On one occasion the deliquescence of my entire body and of my will… led me to the threshold of that room, the room that is still ours, Jacques’ and mine. But I found I couldn’t even lean against the door frame, unconsciously afraid that I would release the spring of a trap.

A man was kneeling in front of her, working his way up under her skirt with her leg over his shoulder. She hopped backwards, lost her balance at the foot of the bed, and — with his “incredulous face” staring at her through the V of her upturned legs — brought the whole exercise to an end and “got back to my feet aloofly.” The threshold of the bedroom held.

She is unsparing about the shape of this morality. It belongs, she says, “more to the realms of superstition than to a clear understanding of what would be right and what would be wrong.” The rules are asymmetric — she has never hesitated to use a stranger’s perfumed soap to wash the night off — and their logic runs through objects rather than relationships. She treats every intimate thing as “a sort of extension of the body, a sensitive prosthesis.” To touch an object that is close to someone is to touch them. Hence the specific horror:

During an orgy, my tongue could easily lick round a pussy which had just been stuffed by a man who had first got off on me, but the thought of drying myself on a towel that some woman who came clandestinely to my home may have used to wipe between her thighs, or the thought that Jacques might use the same one as some guest of mine whose visit he knew nothing about, horrifies me as much as an epidemic of leprosy.

She admits the ranking this produces is odd: she grants more weight to “physical integrity” than to “moral serenity,” and concludes, wryly, “I am a formalist.” The taboos are not ethical; they are ceremonial. They protect the shared vessel of the home and its contaminable surfaces, not the feelings of the people living in it.

Trusting

The paradox at the centre of the chapter is that someone whose intellectual life is organised by the eye — an art critic, someone for whom “images have such a dominant role in my life” — is, during the sexual act itself, functionally blind:

You could say that within the continuum of the world of sex, I move like a cell within its tissue. The nocturnal outings, and the fact of being surrounded, carried and penetrated by shadows suit me well. Better still, I can follow my partner blindly. I put myself in his hands, abandoning my free will; his presence stops anything nasty happening to me.

With Éric she would drive for hours to destinations he never disclosed — “open country or level-3 in an underground car park” — without asking. She offers the general principle: “whatever happened was less strange than nothing happening at all.” But then, pointedly, she offers a scene where the frame wobbled. A Moroccan restaurant near the place Maubert, the two of them alone in a chilly vaulted basement, Millet with her breasts bared and skirt hitched up. Each time the waiter or the owner brought a dish, Éric would push her top further aside and run his hand under her skirt. The men’s looks were heavy and not altogether friendly; their hands moved “quickly, sporadically, on my companion’s tacit invitation.” She ended the wait herself by taking Éric’s cock in her mouth, and they left without finishing. She reads the episode as a crack in Éric’s protective function:

With Éric I always knew that anyone we met, in whatever circumstances, could, on some imperceptible sign from him, open my thighs and slip in his member. I didn’t think there could be any exceptions to this, as if Éric has been a sort of universal ferryman, not to take me across to some promised land, but in order to let people penetrate me, one after another. Hence my uneasiness that evening.

Éric was not a lover so much as an infrastructure. When the infrastructure felt badly calibrated — the wrong men, the wrong room — she felt more apprehensive than she would have with a crowd of anonymous strangers in the Bois.

The trust extended to the law, too. She had no fear of the police. Part of this was childlike confidence in the man she was with — “there was never a single incident” — and part was a dissociation that runs all the way through her:

The body discovered by the representative of the law would have been no more or less than the body penetrated by the stranger in the Bois, not so much an inhabited body as a shell from which I had withdrawn.

This is the passage that does the most to complicate the surface reading of the book. Her “reckless lack of concern” and her stamina are, she says, the same phenomenon: either consciousness is annihilated by determination, or consciousness escapes a body that has been surrendered to automatic functions. Either way, nothing outside the tight circle of two or three bodies exists. “How small that space is! You rarely fuck expansively in a public place. You tend instead to burrow into each other.”

The rest of the section is a collection of scenes that demonstrate the burrow. In the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, she, Henri, and a friend called Fred slip through a door left ajar at the end of a deserted gallery, into the clutter of a temporary storeroom. She forms “a bridge between the two men,” they swap places, both come (one in her cunt, one in her mouth). She triggers her own orgasm while one cock shrinks inside her and the other moves away to watch. Afterwards, upright again, she tells them she can usually manage two or three consecutive orgasms; they laugh and say that is common for a woman. They tuck their shirts back in and go back out into the light to finish the exhibition. The trio now has a permanent complicity with that particular museum.

The visual mechanism is explicit:

In that dark store-room, with my body bent double between two other bodies and my eyes staring vertically down, I was well hemmed in. I am convinced that when my field of vision is limited then, in some primitive way, this conjures up anything that could threaten me or simply upset me, in fact anything that I don’t want to countenance.

A companion scene at a sadomasochist boutique on the boulevard de Clichy tests the same principle. Éric holds her shoulders, her cheek against his stomach, and the small thickset owner of the shop “rams my rear end onto his dick” — a man who, once he has disappeared from her sightline, “disintegrates.” She speaks to Éric, not to him, when she asks for a condom. The owner’s wife might come in, he whispers. A “shy employee” with kohl-ringed eyes watches sullenly. Catching the girl’s eye sideways, Millet sees herself as if on a stage:

I catch her eye, as I glance sideways; her eyes are black, probably ringed with kohl. I feel as if I am on a stage, separated by some indistinct void from a gloomy spectator waiting for the action to start. When I look at her I am in some ways looking back at myself, and I end up seeing myself, but just the head… whereas what is going on above the waist is part of a sort of back-drop. The midget’s pokes become as unreal to me as a thundering sound heard from the wings to imply some far-off action.

A sauna scene introduces a gentler version of the same split. After the tiers of wooden benches and a succession of pricks in her mouth, she lies on a massage table. A little masseuse with a soft voice sympathises with her tiredness and offers talc and kneading. The masseuse feigns ignorance of what has just happened; she addresses Millet “as a beautician would, offering professional but also maternal ministrations to a modern active woman.” Millet slips happily into the role:

I have always liked slipping into a role, especially in this sort of situation, and I replied to her questions, relaxing more by this conformism than by the action of her fingers. It amused me to feel her kneading muscles which a few moments earlier had been subjected to more carnal pressures.

She registers the two realms as politically as much as spatially: the men’s realm was active and she belonged in it; the masseuse’s realm was “passive feminine” and an observer’s — “the two were incontrovertibly separate.”

Then the section opens onto Jacques — and here the protective gaze becomes a photographic one. Jacques photographs Millet naked in “places one passes through,” favouring wrecks and ruins and abandoned furniture. In the border railway station of Port-Bou, she waits for the platform to empty, then walks towards him with her dress open down the front, the shutter clicking. The passage is one of the most tender in the book:

I am looking into the light so I can’t really make out the signs Jacques is giving me. I start walking towards him with the dress open right down the front. I gain confidence as I go. Hypnotised by the fluttering of the silhouette waiting for me at the far end, I feel as if I am carving out my own channel as I go, opening up the acrid, laden air to form a space no wider than the gap between my two swinging arms. Each click of the camera confirms the impunity of my advance.

A second session follows in the sailors’ cemetery on the cliff above the sea, among the multi-storey family graves, with two or three slow-walking women and a game of hide-and-seek. The lens does the anchoring work:

It is not the balustrade which holds me safe above the drop, but his gaze on me, alternately driving me on and following me, and unfurling between us like an anchor. When I face the sea and turn my back on the camera so that I am no longer aware of how far it is from me, then the lens seems to attach itself to my shoulders and the small of my back, drawing me in with a powerful suction.

After supper, on the car bonnet in the last evening light, an approaching dog and a hobbling man break the frame. Jacques chooses to leave. In the car, Millet is furious. He has, for a moment, withdrawn the “extreme attentiveness which has followed me and protected me all day and which was to some extent my link with the world.” She writes a long, quite remarkable comparison between her own state of sexual frustration and the condition of someone locked into a paralysed body:

I would compare it to the state of someone who, since birth or as a result of an accident, doesn’t have the use of their limbs or the power of speech, but whose intelligence and need to communicate remain intact. They depend entirely on those around them to break through their isolation… Sexual frustration plunges me into what I would call a benign autism which makes me utterly dependant on a twinkle of lust in someone else’s eye and the caresses they have the goodness to offer. On that condition, my anxiety dissipates and I can reclaim my place in an environment that is no longer hostile to me.

The scene resolves in the car on the way home: pulled over on a red-route shoulder is impossible, so she cuts herself off from the world and concentrates on her own pubis, circling “that sort of sticky little animal that lives there,” pulling up an old fantasy — fingered to pieces on a stretch of wasteland or in the toilet of a fleapit cinema, she cannot quite remember — and when Jacques eventually reaches across the seat and dives his hand down to fight hers for the “soaking toy,” she “resists the urge to stop him.”

In Perpignan he parks in an empty, brightly lit car park and finishes her off with three or four fingers — “I like hearing the smacking sound of my wet labia; the frankness of this noise wakes me from my fantasies.” The last passage of this block is a small essay on what it actually takes for her to be looked at. It is not nudity that scares her, she insists. It is the suddenness of being revealed, and the gap between introspection and self-image:

Before I give in and spread my thighs wide, before I throw my head back and open up my arms to offer up my breasts, I need a little time. Time, perhaps, to uncoil from the curled position I automatically assumed, a position imprinted on my body when, as a child, I had to hide my masturbating; time to accept – as usual and once again (and even after manoeuvring in front of a camera for hours) – to show my body all at one in its entirety. It is not nudity that I am afraid of – quite the contrary – it is the snapshot moment of revelation… I don’t know how to move from my introspective vision to seeing myself. In fact, to achieve it I need the other’s gaze. I can’t say: ‘There, look!’ I would rather wait till they say, not without caution: ‘Look how I look at you…’

To re-enter reality she passes “through a sort of foetal state,” curling in to take the hardened member in her mouth, and then the whole body “has been put on and filled out like a glove.” A closing image — a series of photographs by an American photographer, printed years later in a magazine called On Seeing — catches her standing beside a couple fucking on a mattress, “a fragile sleepwalker (almost as if I am swaying),” and then bent in two, her head between the girl’s thigh and the boy’s hips, licking at whatever she can reach. She offers three possible similes for what she looks like in the photo: “a conscientious workman – plumber, decorator, mechanic – examining the areas where his intervention is needed; a child whose toy has rolled under the bed and who searches the darkness to find it; an exhausted runner who sits down and drops his chest forward before catching his breath.” The effort, she says, is matched by “intense mental concentration.” This is the architecture the whole book has been describing: the tools, the task, the patient technician’s eye.

Block 9: Details — The Body in Pieces, the Ability to Absorb

Part 4 opens and the focal length drops. Until now we have watched rooms, groups, geographies — the wide lens of scenes and venues. Now the camera pushes in until the frame is filled by one mouth, one arsehole, one nipple, one vein. Millet has said repeatedly that she is a critic by training, and here the critic takes over from the memoirist. She reads her own body, and the bodies that come to her, the way she would read a painting in a gallery — slowly, part by part, interested above all in the edges where one element gives way to another.

The mouth, as instrument and as intelligence

The section opens on a flat declaration: “I really like sucking a man off.” What follows is not braggadocio but a technical monograph. Millet was initiated into fellatio “virtually at the same time” as she learned that the penis was meant to go into the vagina; she thought at first it was a deviant practice, tried to tell a slightly appalled girlfriend about it, and was secretly proud of her aptitude. The pride has never quite left, but she is more interested in explaining the aptitude than boasting about it.

Her explanation is unexpected. The pleasure of giving head is, for her, an exercise in colonising another person’s body through attention.

During an exploration carried out simultaneously with fingers and tongue you come to know every last detail of its topography and even its tiniest reactions – perhaps better than its very owner. As a result there is a feeling of ineffable mastery: a tiny quivering of the end of the tongue, and you unleash a disproportionate response.

To fill the mouth, she notes, is to be filled more distinctly than to be filled in the vagina, where the occupant “seems to melt.” The mouth knows what is happening to it — it can register the glans against the inside of the lip, the back of the palate, the throat. Touch is symmetrical: “you are touched as subtly as you yourself touch.”

Then the mystery that interests her most: the transmission of arousal from one orifice to the other. She can feel, while sucking, “a rigid bracelet” forming at the entrance of her vagina — “the aperture of a barrel ringed with steel.” When the clitoris is being worked, the crossover makes sense. When the signal travels instead from the mouth down, she has only a theory: “The explanation undoubtedly lies in some detour via the mind.” The eye is close to the work; the brain is close behind the eye; the image is the activator.

The description that follows is possibly the most precise piece of choreography in the book — a slow-motion shot of her own technique, narrated with the composure of someone explaining a knot.

I try to keep it there for a moment and even to manoeuvre its rounded tip over the back of my palate until tears come to my eyes, until I’m suffocating. Or – but for this you need your whole body to be well balanced – I hold the hub still and gravitate my whole head round it, distributing gentle strokes from my cheeks, my chin moistened with saliva, my forehead, hair and even the end of my nose.

She notes the connection between this attention and her attention as a writer: “There might even be a distant link between my attention to detail in a blow-job and the care I take over each description in my writing.” Same faculty, different object. She likes, too, to stop being the agent: to have her head held by two firm hands “and to be fucked into my mouth the way I can be fucked in my cunt.” And she admits, almost primly, the vanity of the high marks: “Nothing pleases me more than hearing that I ‘give the best blow-job.’” A friend, interviewed twenty-five years later for the purposes of this book, tells her he has never met a girl who could do it so well, and she lowers her eyes “out of modesty, but also to hide my pride.”

She offers a small theory of equilibrium to close the section. A life organised around the acquisition of moral and intellectual qualities — the respect of one’s peers — needs, to stay balanced, “a proportional excellence in practices which flout these qualities, brush them aside and deny them.” One side earns the respect; the other side earns the smirk. She wants both.

The self-portrait: hydrocephalic and callipygian

“The body in pieces” begins with a thought experiment: if we each drew our own bodies from inside, by dictation, we would produce a gallery of monsters. She sketches herself from within and the result is deliberately unlovely.

I myself would be hydrocephalic and callipygian, and these two protuberances would be joined by an insubstantial mollusc-like arm (I have trouble making my breasts count for anything), and the whole thing would be planted on two posts which impede movement more than they facilitate it (I have had a complex about my legs for a long time).

Head and arse, swollen. Breasts, barely registered. Legs, an inconvenience. The cerebral nature, she suspects, has promoted the organs of the head; what hasn’t made it to the head has gone to the backside. She tracks the substitutions across her childhood: people admired her big dark eyes when she was small, then stopped; so she enlisted her mouth instead, learning “to open it wide, closing my eyes at the same time, at least in certain circumstances.” Her backside, meanwhile, “came to represent the image I had of myself.” Jacques once gave her a Picasso postcard — a preliminary sketch for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a woman seen from behind, torso an isosceles triangle, buttocks curving over “knuckles of ham.” “My portrait,” he said.

The arse as organ of identity

“My arse, another side of who I am.” The phrase is load-bearing. Claude once summarised her with diplomatic economy — “so-so face, but what an arse!” — and she has made her peace with the ranking. She likes Jacques to use the word “arse” for the whole lower half of her body, to slap it while he is inside her, to announce his love “addressed to it” with accompanying percussion. She makes a point of asking.

‘Do for my arse’ is one of my most frequent requests. In response, he grabs my buttocks and shakes their malleable mass as if he were trying to whip up two mountains of cream. If he finishes off the job by inserting two fingers in a duck’s head formation and then opens the bill – i.e. parts the two fingers – in the narrow corridor which leads from the parting of the buttocks to the opening of the cunt, then I’m well ready to be shafted.

What she wants during the act is a particular piece of speech. She asks Jacques whether she is “sucking” him well with her cunt. The answer she wants is the one that reduces her to the part she is most identified with: “Oh, Catherine! Your arse, your arse…” She wants a torch, a bedside lamp on a swivel, anything that puts a focused beam on what she cannot see of herself. If a mirror happens to be in the room and she can turn in profile, she will supervise her own penetration like someone watching flotsam tossed by a swell.

The disclosure that follows is characteristic Millet — she tells you the preferred position, then admits, almost in passing, that it is not in fact her favourite for coming. For years she thought doggy was the thing; then, “we always end up being sexually honest with ourselves, but this can, of course, take a long time,” she had to concede that, deep thrust or not, the classical position was what satisfied her most. She likes, in other words, to be turned over after the show.

The habit has a long history. At six or seven she would expose herself to her brother in a game — skirt up, knickers crumpled into the front, bottom pushed over the back of a little bench — both of them pretending the display, and his brushing hand, were accidents.

Giving caresses the way you receive them

A short theory of reciprocity: “It must be that we give caresses the way that we receive them because I have always responded eagerly to men with sensitive arses.” One friend offered himself on all fours to be finger-fucked until her arm and shoulder were paralysed. Another, at the start of their relationship, played coy about fellatio — then, the second she got his cock into her mouth, he pivoted and “presented me with two resolute buttocks.” She found it easier to reach his arsehole than his glans. She developed, with him, the habit of covering his whole territory in detail — earlobes to the skin of the scrotum, armpits, the crooks of elbows, the folds of the groin — “the systematic occupation of a territory where I left my mark in the form of tiny gobs of spit released from a few centimetres to give the limpid saliva time to extend, the sign of a soiling.”

The bosom, the stroking uncle, and the invention of modesty

Her breasts fare poorly in the self-portrait for a reason. She wonders whether they are lymphatic and unresponsive because she never thought to offer them, or whether she never offered them because they are unresponsive. Either way, stimulating nipples — her partners’ or her own — does not interest her. Men who want their tits pinched find her hand reluctant and her grip insufficient. “Not only is the sadistic the least developed of my impulses, I can’t find any resonance in myself for pleasure provoked in this way.” She prefers her own breasts enveloped in a broader gesture, nicer in the pre-menstrual phase when they are heavier and quiver. She keeps the nipples for herself, and only to feel them under a smooth palm. The strangest contrast she knows is private: kneeling, she rubs her breasts on her own thighs, and “it feels as if my own thighs are strangers to me… their touch comes from outside me, and I melt, always surprised by their velvety skin.”

The chain of association leads her back to a founding erotic memory. A childhood family friend — a grandfather of the household where she and her brother were sent for holidays — was ill and in bed. She sat on the edge of the mattress. He felt her jaw, admired its fineness, reached her neck and warned her she might develop a goitre, then slid his hand under her blouse and brushed breasts that were “barely beginning to bud.” He told her that when she became a woman, she would really like it when people stroked her “titties” that way.

The callused surface of his big hand snagged on my skin. I was aware for the first time of the stiffening of my nipple. I listened to the prediction. I was suddenly brought to the threshold of womanhood and I felt a sense of pride. A child forges its power in the enigma of its future life.

She stayed still, turned her head as if she hadn’t heard, then “extricated myself gently.” She felt sorry for him — his wife was crippled, obese, covered in suppurating sores he dressed morning and evening — and also found his lumpy nose comical. That evening she compared notes with his granddaughter, who shared her bed and had been touched too. They understood they had been given a secret more valuable than any moral lesson would have been. (A few years later she mentioned masturbation in confession; the priest assigned a few aves and a Pater, bored; “I felt nothing but contempt for him afterwards.”)

What she carried out of that afternoon, she says, is the reflex she still has when a man’s eyes settle on the buttons of her blouse — the same composed stillness, the same absence of visible response. There are no low-cut dresses in her wardrobe. If she sits next to a woman in revealing clothes on a sofa she will pull her own skirt down and hunch over her chest, partly because the exposure feels like her own, partly because her impulse — the one she has already described — would otherwise be to reach in and finish undressing the stranger. And yet for years she wore no underwear at all. She can’t remember why; not the feminist reasons, which she didn’t hold, but something like “a minimalist, almost functionalist principle: the principle according to which a free body need not weigh itself down with ornamentation, as long as it is ready without the need for any preliminaries.”

Narrative as distance

She pauses here to notice a contradiction and does not resolve it, only describes it. She has just explained why she covers what is perfectly acceptable to show. In the same pages she has exposed what most people keep secret. Her answer is that writing in the first person reliably turns the “I” into a “she.” Description is distance.

The more I describe my body and my actions, the more I leave myself behind. Who recognises themselves in those magnifying mirrors which show cheeks and noses as vast fissured landscapes?

Sexual pleasure, she adds, produces a similar distance from the self. Perhaps the distance and the pleasure are structurally related — one enabling the other. The woman who is uncomfortable under a gaze in a living room, who hesitated at suggestive clothes, who nevertheless had anonymous adventures with faceless partners, “takes indisputable pleasure in exposing herself on condition that the exposure is distanced at once, by a narrative.”

Image and language work together. In the mirror she can measure to the centimetre “the amount of flesh that your own flesh can swallow,” and the measurement is more exciting because it is accompanied by words. She and Jacques developed a commentary that she thinks of as purely factual — not a competition in obscenity, but a need for accuracy. She transcribes a specimen:

‘Can you feel how wet I am? Even my thighs are soaked, and my little clit’s all swollen.’ ‘God, you move your arse well! Does it want my prick? Does it?’ ‘Yes, but I want to feel your knob on my clit again first, can I rub you against it?’ ‘Yes, and afterwards we’re going to give the arse a good ramming!’

They are like dubbing actors, she says, their eyes on the screen, lending voices to characters called Arse, Cunt, Balls and Prick. Narration breaks the body into its pieces; this is useful; it makes the bits available as instruments. She cites the scene in Godard’s Le Mépris in which Piccoli runs word by word over Bardot’s body, each word bringing a part into focus. “How many times don’t people say ‘Look!’ when they’re fucking?”

The mirror above the basin

The chapter closes on a setpiece. The bathroom layout is “perfect” — the basin takes the shock of the thrusts at the front, the mirror above it returns her face to her. She watches. The face is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hollow; the mouth is half open “like an automated doll when the mechanism winds down”; the eyes are “intolerably listless.” She avoids her own gaze and seeks it out.

That gaze is the anchoring point; it is by seeing its reflection that I establish this certainty: there I am, that is me coming. It is the siphon through which all of me is evacuated: I cannot recognise myself in such a state of release; I reject it with a feeling of shame. That is how pleasure stays on a knife-edge: just as the multiplication of two negative numbers gives a positive number, this pleasure is the product not, as is sometimes said, of an absence from oneself, but of the bringing together of this perceived absence and the feeling of horror that it provokes in a flash of conscience.

A porn film she once saw codified the arrangement: the man took the woman from behind, the camera faced her, his voice on the soundtrack — “Look! Look at the camera!” — and the woman stared down the lens. One man, in life, gave her an orgasm she still remembers in detail because with every thrust he commanded “Look me in the eye.” She obeyed, knowing he was “witness to the decomposition of my face.”

An ability to absorb

The final section of the block takes a step back from the mirror and toward a theory of her own apparatus. Porn films, she notes, offer stereotyped climaxes — the accelerated jerks, the open mouth, the scream — but orgasms can also happen in stillness and in silence, and can be watched building. The clichés belong to the warm-up, where everyone borrows the same lines. Men bark variants of “call me, go on, call me.” Women, “even the most independent-minded, tend towards subjection, even to the extent of asking for what would be horrible injuries” — “Stab it into me!”, “Go on, tear me open!” Watching herself on video, rubbing a freshly spurted load over her breasts, she wonders whether she is simply imitating what she has seen on screen dozens of times. She notes, for the record, that the jet was less frothy than in films but “nevertheless spectacular.”

The deeper the pleasure, the less hamming. She describes the phases of her own climb. In the active phase she kicks her heels against her partner’s buttocks and thighs, spurs him on; then the activity drops off, the body goes inert under him, the commentary thins. “My voice sounds quite different.” The repeated “yes, yes, yes” and “go on, go on” condense into spaced-out syllables — “keep going” — delivered with “the clarity and authority of an actor who has learned to project their voice.” Sometimes the yes becomes a no. Sometimes she sees herself, in images, burying her face in her hands.

Then the self-appraisal that gives the section its title. She does the job she does, she says, because she has a gift for observation, which is coupled with “a solid superego.” She doesn’t let go easily. Even in the moments when she is supposed to be passive she is often still alert. The same faculty she uses on a painting or on strangers in the Métro is what she turns on her partners. It makes her an expert; it makes her competent; it also has a cost.

I have spontaneously slipped under other people’s skins in an effort to myself feel what they were feeling. That is not just a turn of phrase; I have surprised myself mimicking habits and exclamations that were peculiar to someone else. Which amounts to saying that I often relegated my own pleasure to the background. It took me a long time, a really long time, to identify the caresses, the positions that I liked best.

This is the sentence around which the section turns, and probably around which the book turns. Her formulation of what happened is calm and a little astonishing.

I was not right from the start granted a body predisposed to pleasure. First I had to give myself – literally abandon my whole body – to sexual activity, to lose myself in it so thoroughly that I confused myself with my partner so that I could emerge from this transformation having sloughed off the body I was given at birth and taken on a second body, one capable of taking as much as it could give.

The ability to absorb is not a gift. It is the result of a long, patient self-estrangement. She had to lend herself out, disappear into other people, before she could come back with a body that worked.

The portrait gallery

The observational habit gives her, she says, “relative accuracy” about the bodies of her main partners — and about what their faces retained at the moment the rest of them came undone. She can recall the convulsive movements, the exclamations, the idiolects. Observation without judgement, she notes, “keeps conscience in the realms of objectivity.” A man’s beauty could seduce her and a flaw cut the fascination short. She offers a specimen: a round face set off with almond eyes, but “mounted on a head that was very flattened at the back which when I looked at it in profile brought to mind a squashed balloon.” A quarter turn and the face that looked like a Renaissance painting turned out to have no more depth than a canvas. One exception to the catalogue — the only partner younger than her, the one whose looks she found most seductive — has left her no sexual memories at all. She remembers his expressions and his sentences; none of them happened in bed.

She proposes a small hypothesis about the male face at orgasm: perhaps nature, to spare men the strain of being torn in two, decided that while their muscles go to their limits their faces would be bathed in peace. She has a gallery of such peaceful faces — one mouth making a little “o” around a moustache, daft as a child in costume; a smile so half-hearted it could pass for embarrassment, “the sort of smile a modest person would wear as they apologised for being caught in some indecent act”; and the man whose usually smooth face took on “a mask of suppressed pain” and then added, to the usual “I’m coming, I’m coming,” the words “oh, my God!”

Calm is not always the same as peace. One partner was so contemplative that at climax he seemed to vacate his own body. His weight was on her, active and impassive — “he had abandoned it to me, and this absent face would park next to mine while I watched his ghost transported by orgasm floating above us like in a fantasy film.” He masturbated by lying face down, squeezing his cock between his thighs until the muscles stood out; she — “an experienced expert of onanism” — admired the concentration and the mental isolation it required.

With time, with enough repetitions with the same man, she learned to read the signs of imminent orgasm before he did — a silence falling into speech, a breathing settling early, a position he unconsciously returned to. One friend was an imaginative fucker, talkative and acrobatic, who would keep her going for an hour with his erotic fabulations and an inventive props cupboard — “cucumbers, sausages, Perrier bottles, policeman’s luminous white truncheon, etc.” — and then, a few minutes before coming, would go quiet, file away steadily, replace words with discreet little moans, as if announcing to himself: “Right, that’s enough fun and games, let’s get down to business.” After he had finished he would lie on top of her and give a little “hi, hi, hi” in her ear, half forced laugh, half apology, as if asking forgiveness for having dragged her along on some escapade. Before opening his eyes, he would scratch her scalp affectionately.

Abjection, and the scarecrow

The block ends by widening the aperture of what she will take in, physically and aesthetically. She doesn’t flinch from abjection — “I have never been put off titillating the folds of an anus with my tongue (‘Hmm! It smells of shit,’ I hear myself saying, ‘but it’s good’)” — and she is just as content with a body that is damaged or slack as with a firm one. She likes the man who parts the vulva with a surgeon’s care, admires it with a connoisseur’s relish, and brings her off “with an extraordinary precision soon unbearable.” But she is equally happy with the opposite: the man who grabs her hips “with about as much ceremony as if he were snatching hold of the rail on a listing boat”; the one who mounts her “with the vacant distant expression of a mating animal”; the one who lies full length on her back, fingers dug deep enough into her buttocks to leave bruises, indifferent to whether her thighs are cramping under two bodies’ weight.

Under men like this she becomes an object under labour — “a lump of flesh, plonked onto the bed and turned over with no more response of its own than a ball of bread dough.” She watches her breasts spread and flow with the motion, “rocked like the water in the bottom of a boat.” She watches the cellulite on her buttocks pinched in a pair of hands. She looks up and catches the face of the workman at work on her, and the face, she notes, is not one of beatific ecstasy.

That face does not do beatific ecstasy. It would frighten me if the denatured bird that I am did not fall in love with the scarecrow. One eye is half closed because of a tensing effect which only affects half the face – I have already seen this happen to people who have had strokes – and the corresponding corner of the mouth twists to expose the gums. If I am not afraid of this snarling grimace, that is because it doesn’t express pain but rather a supreme effort, a prodigious tenacity, and I am proud to submit myself to this force.

The image is the keynote of the whole block. The close-up is not flattering — on either of them. The mouth twists, the eye half-closes, the face distorts. But distortion, when you are close enough to see it, is the sign of effort, and effort is what she has trained herself to absorb. The body in pieces, the ability to absorb: two ways of saying that she has learned to read a man and hold him at the same time.

Block 10: Patient, the Manifestations of Pleasure, Viewing

The book closes on the three things that have quietly governed it all along: the waiting, the coming, and the seeing. Millet does not build to a climax. She does something stranger — she slows down, turns the lens on herself, and watches.

Patient

She looks back and notices she did much of it in a kind of trance. Not a spiritual trance — a practical one.

“For much of my life I fucked naively. What I mean by that was that sleeping with men was a natural activity which didn’t unduly bother me.”

She kept a ledger. Jealousy, pride, lies — “written off on the profit and loss account.” A friend, informed that juggling four or five men was hard, told her to take a sixth; the problem wasn’t volume, it was balance. She took the advice in spirit if not in letter. She “left everything up to chance.” She “paid no more attention to the quality of sexual relationships.” If a man made her do things not to her liking, that wasn’t reason enough to question anything. The friendship mattered more than the sex, and the sex — good, bad, indifferent — went onto the balance sheet. Then the line that functions as the hinge of the whole chapter, maybe of the whole book:

“I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that, until I was about 35, I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter. That I hadn’t understood.”

What she did instead, she says, was improvise small technical devices — murmuring “I love you” at the precise moment she felt the “little motor” in her partner’s groin kick in, or repeating his name, under the impression this would help him finish. “Purely opportune declarations of love.” Spoken under no emotion. A tool, like a wrench.

She gives examples of the patience this required. Romain, weightless on top of her in a bare studio on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, ejaculating so softly she only knew it was over when she felt something running down her thigh. His cock, she says, was like “a novice who doesn’t move from his chair when all the participants in a ceremony rise to their feet.” There was, in lying under him and feeling nothing, “almost a sense of comfort from feeling nothing, nothing nice, but nothing nasty either.”

She gives this quality a name:

“In some situations I can display a rare patience. I have in me sufficient resources to remain silent and give my mind a free reign, accepting the fact that others are living their lives alongside me… Feeling nothing, not minding and accomplishing well the whole ritual to its conclusion… Indifferent because mentally so well tucked away at my very core that I could control my body as a puppeteer does a puppet.”

The puppeteer image is the key. Her body performs; her mind sits elsewhere, slightly above it, holding the strings. This is how she tolerates a cunnilingus that neither turns her on nor off, a finger that fails to find her clitoris, a partner who finishes while she doesn’t. So long as the evening around it — the conversation, the unusual guests, the apartment she can wander through pretending to live a different life — has some texture, “my train of thought is so absent from contingencies that it won’t be hampered by a mere body, even if that body is wrapped in the arms of another body.” The thought is actually freer, she notes, when the other person is busy with the body; it means the body is being used as an “erotic accessory” and has been usefully taken off her hands.

She catalogues men who behaved badly and notes it with the cool of a bookkeeper. The older artist who rubbed against her at his bric-a-brac table while she drifted off looking at the bags under his eyelids. The man at Paul-Doumer who announced mid-fellation, “With you, I don’t stand on ceremony with you, I’ll take you later” — and didn’t. “He is behaving badly,” she thinks clearly, and does nothing.

She distinguishes herself, carefully, from the masochist:

“I am docile not because I like submission, I have never tried to put myself in a masochistic situation, but out of indifference to the uses to which we put our bodies.”

What follows is one of the book’s most self-revealing passages: the man who periodically needed to urinate on her. She would kneel in front of him, mouth open, “like someone about to take communion.” The jet was “full, firm and hot. Bitter. So bitter I have never tasted its equal.” She had to duck and dive as one would under a hose. Once, lying in it, she burst out laughing — and he was furious, held it against her for years. “There’s one thing you’re not good at, and that’s being pissed on.” She accepts the charge but clarifies: she wasn’t laughing out of embarrassment or mockery. “I laughed because, unable to draw any masochistic satisfaction from the situation which I didn’t find humiliating, at least I did feel a sense of jubilation rolling in a disgusting liquid substance.” Jubilation, for her, was the point. The rite was a notch in the “quest for the sexual Grail.” She simply couldn’t be humiliated by it.

Same logic with the man near the Gare de l’Est who needed to be slapped, who called her “my queen” (which she found ridiculous) and whose wet, waiting lips repelled her. She couldn’t hit him hard enough. She explains with the precision of someone diagnosing her own failure: if he had “put a touch of humour into his request, or camped it up so that it became an act I myself would have entered into the game more easily, got into it and hit him harder.” What killed the spanking was his sincerity. She needed the theatre.

And then, always, the wait. Every rendezvous was approached in a state of “exacerbated desire,” but the interval between kiss and penetration was often too long; by the time his cock arrived, her “little internal thread had broken.” The perfectionist in her should, she admits, have reconceived the architecture — accepted the licking as a prelude, forgone the copulation, treated the crushing hug at the door as the apex. She didn’t. She kept waiting for the main event and kept arriving late to her own desire.

The section circles back to the puppeteer. She can programme her body apart from its physical reactions, the way one hears terrible news without flinching, or keeps crying after being consoled. “If I set an assembly-line of pleasure in motion inside me, even if my body encounters some discomforts, they will not be enough to stop the assembly-line.” The man who drenched her in sweat — she could hear every drop land and feel the icy patch spreading on her chest — never got a word of complaint. The man whose cheek gave her an allergy that lasted for hours — she never thought to put cream on first. She just went. She kept going. She was patient.

Different manifestations of pleasure

She notes, with characteristic clarity, that displeasure is easier to describe because it happens in ordinary time. Pleasure does not.

“Talking about pleasure, extreme pleasure, is much more a work of art. Isn’t it anyway commonly compared to being transported out of oneself and the world, and, therefore, outside time as well? And is there the added, aporetic problem of wanting to identify and recognise something that no one has yet described for you, or only sketchily?”

She tries anyway. And she starts, honestly, with the fact that the surest orgasm she has ever had is the one she gives herself. “For a large part of my life I fucked without regard to pleasure.” The concession that follows is striking:

“For someone who has known so many partners, no outcome was ever as guaranteed as when I sought it alone. I control the pitch of my pleasure to the nearest fraction of a second, which isn’t possible when you have to take into account someone else and when you depend on their moves not your own.”

She narrates the ritual. She is a porn actress auditioning fifteen naked candidates. She — officer reviewing troops — examines each cock, squeezes each apparatus. The middle finger works the clitoris; the mons swells; she can abandon the circling and feel “the whole as I would a pear.” She picks one, leads him by the cock to a massage table, lies down. Already six or eight minutes in. And then she does something remarkable — she checks herself. She knows, somehow, that if she continues on this track the orgasm won’t be intense. So she stops. She backtracks. She rewinds the fantasy. “There can be multiple flashbacks, each one slightly different.” This time, two or three boys take turns in her cunt. She increases the pressure. A few murmured words of encouragement — “You’re so good,” “Go on…” — spoken aloud, crisply. Then:

“When the time comes, my mind empties. Exit the fifteen stallions. I grimace with concentration, curl my mouth up in an ugly snarl; one of my legs becomes paralysed but, in an unexpected switch, I sometimes spontaneously knead one of my breasts gently with my free hand. The orgasm comes as the result of a decision.”

Decision. Not accident, not grace. She can see it coming. Eyes often wide open but unseeing — fixed on a “fantasy Xray.” If it goes well, the pleasure comes “from far away, from the very depths of that long gut, with its ridged, grey walls, right to the mouth which opens and closes like the jaw of a fish.” Six or seven waves. Afterwards she stays a moment, slides her fingers over her vulva, brings them to her nose “to revel in the sweetish smell. I don’t wash my hands.”

“I masturbate with the regularity of a civil servant.”

A civil servant, of orgasm. The sentence is deadpan. She can do it during sex too, she adds, but it takes longer because the real cock in her competes with the imagined one. The real one must wait, “motionless and patient until I give the signal, a ‘yeh’ of total acquiescence or a toss of my head,” and then her self-provoked spasms meet his final charge.

She admits — startlingly, given the book — that she went for years without even recognising her own orgasm. When a male friend once, rarely, asked her intimately how a man could tell when a woman had come, and specifically “Is it when she has spasms?,” she hesitated, said yes to not look a fool, and thought to herself, “so that’s what it is.” Until then her body’s signals had never been identified as signs. “Having not knowingly striven for the thing they signified, I could not recognise them as signs.” This is the sentence on which an unacknowledged anxiety begins; it grew, she says, into the dissatisfaction that opens the first chapter of the book. The circle closes.

She explains that she had always masturbated not on the clitoris directly but by sliding the lips of the vulva against each other. The feminist dictionaries of the body confused her; when she finally consulted one, she “closed my thighs the way you would close a medical dictionary: for fear of finding in yourself the illnesses they describe which would preclude you from some very enjoyable habits.” The clitoris, when she finally went looking for it, wasn’t where she expected:

“The clitoris was not an obvious landmark like a nail on a wall, a steeple in a landscape or a nose on a face, it was a sort of muddled knot, with no true shape, a minute chaos where two little tongues of flesh meet like when a backwash throws two waves together.”

Then comes the distinction that divides the book’s two kinds of pleasure:

“Pleasure taken alone can be told, pleasure taken with another is elusive. Unlike when I bring about my own orgasm, when I am with someone else I never say: ‘This is it.’ No defining moment, no flash. Rather a slow settling into a mellow state of pure sensation.”

She describes it as the inverse of local anaesthetic: fully sensitised but mentally absent. “I am cut to the quick and my entire body becomes the rim of this laceration, while my mind reaches out to a sleep-like state.” She can still move but only “on auto-pilot” — enough to utter, as a last politeness, “Does it matter if I don’t move any more?” It is more like the moment before fainting than like a climax. “Invaded, yes, but by emptiness. I feel cold like when the blood ebbs away.” Each thrust pushes displaced air out of her and the air makes “a clear sound.” She used to scream, until a friend told her it was a sign of hysteria; she gave it up. “All I give out now are farts. The first one catches me by surprise as I drowsily luxuriate. Others follow. I am amazed at my largesse.”

The passage accumulates other strange aftermaths: for a while, after intense orgasms, her muscles would lock and she’d lie as stiff as a corpse on the bed — a calcium deficiency, the gynaecologist said, though she wondered whether some part of her mind was holding on. Later the opposite arrived. Instead of stiffening she’d sob, uninhibited, “in a way you hardly ever do in adult life, the heart filled with sorrow.” Partners were terrified; they thought they’d hurt her. They hadn’t.

“They were tears of hopeless joy. I had jettisoned everything, but all that everything was only this: the body I had offered was just a breath of air, and the one I held and kissed was already light years away. So utterly destitute, how could I not express my distress?”

The passage’s final image is gentler than anything that has come before. Violence, she says, doesn’t actually deliver her. “Even the most violent onslaughts don’t get the better of me.” What she prefers is tiny adjustment, a mechanical kindness. A very tall man used to gently drum his fingers in the small of her back — “the housewife doing her dusting.” Three or four sharp little taps.

“I rose into the air like a sheet of paper in a draught. It made my cunt take in another few millimetres of his cock. It was enough.”

Viewing

And then — the book’s last frame — she watches herself.

She has seen herself on video and what surprises her most is how supple she looks. In daily life she feels awkward, ungainly, barely a swimmer; on screen she sees “this inoffensive reptile stretching, retracting and reacting swiftly and completely to every demand.” She itemises the poses like stills from a catalogue. The odalisque, on her side, legs slightly bent, the curve of the buttocks brought forward, her gaze turned that way too, waiting. The tighter curl, the quarter-twist of the waist, the neck turned so she can check the slit is visible. The animal “pretends to be an inanimate object.” A partner bends her legs further to wedge one of his in the triangle; “he looks as if he is gathering up a parcel to make it easier to pick up.”

She gives the positions animal identities — a frog, upside-down insects beating the air — and then, preferring to be taken from the front, reassumes her own agency: “By lifting my head and, if need be, holding up my ankles or my calves, I can watch what’s happening framed between my wide-apart legs.” The framing is literal. She is the viewer inside the image.

“The relationship between the elements is reversed: it is no longer a stake driving into the earth, but the earth quaking to swallow it up.”

She notes the shape she makes when pinned on her back — an upside-down vase, knees brought to the face, thighs wide, “leaving just enough room for the plunging rod.” She is describing her body as if it were a still life. The camera has taught her to.

She extends the analysis to orgasm itself. Pleasure is fleeting because the body by then is “evanescent” — it has been absorbed into itself the way “the body of a pianist is concentrated in the tips of his fingers.” On a video of her masturbating, a man next to her remarks that she looks like a guitar player: her fingers swinging back and forth in the dark, relaxed but precise. She never inserts her fingers deep; she barely wets the middle one and works the front. Close-ups show her with her mouth full and eyes wide open, staring at the screen — “there is a degree of technical control in this gaze.” In another close-up her eyes are closed and her mouth offered: “I look as if I am sound asleep when I am actually concentrating hard to stay in focus.”

The last extended scene of the book is a film directed by Jacques — her partner, the book’s domestic ground — in which she walks around the building. He puts her in a dress of transparent black linen and makes her climb their stairs twenty times. The dress functions, on film, like an X-ray. You can see from behind “the pneumatic animation of the buttocks,” and from in front the trembling of her breasts with each step, her pubic hair “disappears into a wide shadow when it rubs up against the cloth.” Then he has her stand in the concierge’s little glass booth, dress rolled down to her waist, then without the dress at all, miming the concierge’s ordinary duties — naked at work. The fantasy is exact enough that even she, who does not embarrass easily, is thrown:

“Oh, if only you could leave home and go to work with nothing on like that! It wouldn’t only be the weight of the clothes we would be freed from, it would also be the heaviness of the body which they would take with them.”

More naked than naked. That is her phrase. The clothing’s weight is also the body’s weight; to be seen without either is to be weightless. And this is what she has been, in every section of the book, trying to describe: the moment at which the body, thoroughly offered up, becomes pure image, pure breath, pure watchable thing. The sequence continues back inside the apartment. White sofa. Her body clear against it. The hand “comes and goes slowly, weighed down by a huge ring,” the ring glinting and momentarily compromising the clarity of the image. Thighs and legs spread wide, “inscribing an almost perfect square.” She notes, in a quiet aside, that what she now sees on the screen is exactly what the man behind the camera was seeing at the time. She was, in that moment, being viewed from the position from which she would later view herself.

And the book ends on a single, grammatically perfect sentence — the whole project distilled into one closing image. When Jacques, still filming, puts down his free hand to replace hers, to slide his own organ into her:

“My organ in which he slid his was as tumescent as never before. The reason was immediately clear: I was already filled by the coincidence of my real body and these multiple, volatile images.”

That is the last line. Not an orgasm. Not a resolution. A coincidence. The real body and its watched image meeting inside her at the same moment, and the body responding — tumescent, “as never before” — not to the cock but to the convergence. The arousal, finally, is the arousal of being seen seeing herself. The book has been about many things — men, parties, corridors, the patience of waiting — but this is what it lands on. The gaze closes the circuit. She is the spectacle and she is the spectator and at the end, just for a second, those two Catherines meet.

---

Claude’s Take

The book’s central trick, and the reason it works, is the register. Millet applies to her own sex life the exact faculty she has spent four decades applying to paintings — the slow, patient, taxonomic gaze that belongs to a curator drafting catalogue copy. The move is almost mechanical: replace the object on the wall with her own body, keep the voice identical, see what happens. What happens is that most of the tropes of sex writing fail on contact. There is no titillation, because titillation requires the writer to lean in. There is no moralising, because moralising requires the writer to step back. There is also, crucially, no sentimentality, no sisterhood, no redemption arc. There is only the inventory. The radical act is the refusal to perform either shock or contrition. A woman who has done this much should, by the laws of Anglo-American memoir, either be titillating us or begging our forgiveness; Millet does neither, and in that refusal is the book.

The Catholic scaffolding is more load-bearing than it first appears. The opening image — a child in bed doing arithmetic in the dark, running parallel ledgers of husbands and children and God’s dinner portions — is funny, but it also tells you how to read everything that follows. Enumeration is how she thinks. God was the thundering voice and also the plaster baby and also the suffering man and also the ghost; a husband could be one or many; a child could be serially acquired. The frame is multiplicity, and the native operation is counting. When she admits, later, that she “lost belief” in God when she “started having sexual relationships” and then calls herself “a rather passive woman, having no goal other than those that other people set for me,” she is tracing a swap — the Catholic receptivity detached from its original object and left running, like an engine on the wrong fuel. The orgies are the continuation of matins by other means. She would have been a nun.

What works beautifully: the architectural sensibility. Victor’s grotto as a scaled-up Saint-Germain boutique. The porte de Saint-Cloud car park as an airport lounge. The Dieppe tent as the child’s sheet pulled over the head. The concierge’s loge fantasy with its invisible central body. Every sexual scene doubles as a space, and every space organises the scene’s meaning. The second great success is the close-up passages in the fourth section — her theory of fellatio as colonisation-through-attention, her self-portrait as hydrocephalic and callipygian, the bathroom mirror setpiece where pleasure is defined as “the bringing together of this perceived absence and the feeling of horror that it provokes in a flash of conscience.” The closing line — my organ in which he slid his was as tumescent as never before. The reason was immediately clear: I was already filled by the coincidence of my real body and these multiple, volatile images — lands because the entire book has been training the reader to recognise that the arousal is the arousal of being watched watching herself.

What creaks: the emotional distance occasionally tips into real coldness, and more often into dissociation she doesn’t quite interrogate. The line in “Trusting” — the body discovered by the representative of the law would have been no more or less than the body penetrated by the stranger in the Bois, not so much an inhabited body as a shell from which I had withdrawn — is a disturbing sentence that the book lets stand without examination. The puppeteer image in “Patient,” where her mind sits above her body holding the strings, is offered as a mode of mastery; it can be read equally as a mode of absence. She concedes this only obliquely — the admission that until thirty-five she had not imagined her own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter is, when you think about it, a devastating sentence — but she does not dwell. The book is a document of a woman who learned to come late and alone, with a Japanese dildo, after decades of serving other people’s climaxes. Millet reports this with the same even hand as the rest, but the reader is left to notice what it costs.

The class question, similarly, goes unasked. Her milieu is the Parisian art-world middle class; her partners are artists, critics, dentists, photographers, the occasional Bois trucker, two Black cooks in a Dauphine attic. She notes the class and race markers with a curator’s eye — the Gaminerie boutique, the swanky cars at Les Glycines, the “lanky tomboy” with “very short, coarse hair” — and leaves them there, unexamined, the way wall text doesn’t editorialise. A more political writer would make the silences speak; she doesn’t. This is a limit of the book, but it is also a condition of its register — the moment she begins to explain or apologise, the book collapses. The cost of the prose is the cost of the prose.

Who should read it: Anyone who has liked Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Chantal Akerman’s films, or the more analytical end of French confessional writing. Anyone interested in the memoir-as-cataloguing tradition, or in what a curatorial sensibility looks like when turned on its owner. Readers who can receive graphic content without needing a frame that justifies it.

Who shouldn’t: Anyone expecting eroticism. Anyone expecting confession in the Anglo-American sense (growth, insight, moral arrival). Anyone who needs the writer to be on either side of her own material. The book resists all three.

claude_score: 8. A score is a blunt instrument for a book like this. Eight is where I land because the prose is genuinely singular — there isn’t another book in this register — and the architectural intelligence is real. I hold back from nine because the emotional distance, which is the book’s defining virtue, is also the thing that finally limits it: there are moments when the reader wants the writer to notice what she has just said, and she doesn’t. That restraint is exactly what makes the book what it is. It is also what keeps it from being more.