The Margot Affair

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Onstage my mother was her truest self. I would see the transformation within moments, a slow-building intimacy between herself and the audience. Mid-scene she would remove her shirt with the ease of a man, as if taking off a pair of socks. Then she would hold her red curls with both hands and lift them high enough to expose the length of her neck, jut out her elbows and accentuate the slope of her shoulders. She could be whomever she wanted. In her one-woman shows she would address the audience as though they were old friends. I could feel her effect on them as they tilted forward, eyes wide, their pores opening in her presence. She carried this effortless familiarity out into the world. With strangers, she was joyful and gracious. She dazzled. In other words, she was a true actress.

She had been acting since her teenage years, but it was a lead role in the nineties, when I was barely five years old, that propelled her career and led to her solo acts. The play in question was Mère, a short, forceful production that ran eighty minutes without an intermission. It had a small cast: a man, his wife whom she played, their three young children, and the man s father. It ended in a long scene where the mother kills her children in a bathtub. The potential for such a violent act wasn t at first visible in the mother although there was a hovering sense of unease, interspersed with moments of levity and tenderness. At that age, no one told me my mother was playing a woman who murders her children, but I knew offstage she would often choose to stay in character.

At home, she was a stranger to me. I wanted her to return to where she d come from, as if she could be reabsorbed into herself. She was turned inside out, her interior laid flat along her skin for everyone to see. I preferred her right side out, a mother in the conventional sense.

I wanted to be proud of my mother, and yet most of the time I would find myself annoyed. What others admired in her

Sanaë Lemoine was born in Paris to a Japanese mother and French father, and raised in France and Australia. She earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA at Columbia University. She now lives in New York.

A diary and a page-turner and a masterful debut, all at once. Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling

Gorgeous . . . very French. . . in lush, lyrical prose that perfectly captures the heightened emotion and confusion of being a young woman with a bruised heart and limited experience. Though the book seems to be about an absent father, it s more about a tricky mother, and about motherhood in general. It asks the ultimate question about this most complicated of relationships: What will a mother do for her child? Sarah Lyall, The New York Times (Daily Review)

"Drumming with tension, The Margot Affair grapples with the complexity of familial love." Marie Claire 
 
[A] perfect mix of literary and entertaining . . . This is one of those books that you didn t know you needed until you read the first few pages and you go: oh, I m home. LitHub

Unusual and accomplished . . .  Ms. Lemoine s story moves in intriguing leaps and twists until her real subject is revealed. . . . Using clever anecdotes, nods to French cinema and allusions to Bonjour Tristesse, Françoise Sagan s classic coming-of-age tale, the novel asks what exactly makes a good mother. . . . Good novels can supply insights into other cultures, and, for outsiders, one of this book s pleasures is the glimpse it affords into French mores and habits. . . . Here she lifts the window slats not just on the covert behavior of consenting adults, but on many facets of bourgeois Parisian life. The Economist
 
. . . one juicy book. It s a commentary about the tolls of secrets and power and will make you feel like you re sitting in a Parisian café the whole time. The Skimm

Subtle, beautiful, serious. Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

A deeply immersive novel about the ways in which your family may fail you . . . Written