NOW THAT WE WERE FREE OF THE DOMESTIC TYRANT, our life took an exhilarating turn. We were living in an attic apartment made up of a series of former maids’ rooms. I could hardly stand up in my bedroom, and there were secret hiding places everywhere.

I was six years old. A studious little girl, bright and hardworking, obedient and well behaved, and vaguely melancholy, as is often the case with the children of divorced parents. I wasn’t secretly rebellious in any way; I went out of my way to avoid committing the slightest misdemeanor. A good little soldier, my principal ambition consisted of bringing home a glowing report card for my mother, whom I still loved more than anything.

In the evenings, she’d play Chopin on the piano into the small hours. Or, with the volume on the hi-fi turned up as high as it would go, we’d dance late into the night; the neighbors, furious, would bang on the walls and yell because the music was too loud, but we didn’t care. At the weekend, my mother loved to luxuriate in the bath; she was magnificent, with a Kir Royale in one hand, a John Player Special in the other, an ashtray balanced on the edge of the tub, vermilion fingernails contrasting with her milky skin and platinum blond hair.

The housework could wait.

My father soon managed to wriggle out of paying her alimony. Things were tight at the end of the month. In spite of the regular parties in our apartment, and her—always fleeting—love affairs, my mother turned out to be more solitary than I realized. When I asked her one day about the significance of one of her lovers in her life, she said, “There’s no question of me imposing him on you, or replacing your father.” She and I were inseparable. No man would ever again be allowed to intrude on our relationship.

At my new school I became best friends with another little girl, called Asia. We learned to read and write together and explored the neighborhood, a charming village with café terraces at every corner. What we shared above all was an unusual freedom. Unlike most of our classmates, we had no one to keep an eye on us at home; there was no money for babysitters, even in the evening. It wasn’t worth it. Our mothers completely trusted us. We never misbehaved.

Once, when I was seven, my father invited me to stay over at his apartment. An exceptional occurrence, which was never to be repeated. Since my mother and I had moved out, my old bedroom had been turned into a study.

I went to sleep on the sofa. I woke up at dawn, in this place where I now felt like a stranger. Idly, I inspected his library, which was classified and displayed with meticulous care. I took down two or three books at random, then carefully replaced them. I lingered on a miniature copy of the Koran in Arabic, stroked its tiny red leather cover, tried to decipher its incomprehensible characters. It wasn’t a toy, of course, but it did look like one. And what else was I supposed to play with, when there wasn’t a single game in the whole place?

An hour later my father got up and came into the living room. The first thing he did was survey the entire space, his gaze alighting on the bookcases. He crouched down on his knees to inspect each shelf. His behavior was a bit deranged. And then, with the obsessive diligence of a tax inspector, he declared triumphantly: “You touched this book, and this one, and this one!” His thundering voice rang across the room. I didn’t understand. What could be wrong with touching a book?

What was so horrifying was that he was right, in all three cases. Luckily I wasn’t tall enough to reach the top shelf, upon which his eyes lingered longest, and from where his gaze returned to me with a mysterious sigh of relief.

What would he say if he knew that the previous evening, when I’d gone to find something in a cupboard, I’d come face-to-face with a life-size, naked woman, all in latex, with orifices forming horrible hollows and folds where her mouth and sex were, a mocking smile, dead eyes that fastened onto mine, squeezed between a vacuum cleaner and a broom? An image straight from hell, repressed as quickly as the cupboard door was pushed shut.

After school, Asia and I often took the most roundabout way home, to delay the moment we had to say goodbye. At an intersection with two streets there was a little esplanade, at the bottom of a flight of steps, where teenagers gathered to roller-skate or skateboard or smoke cigarettes in little groups. We turned the stone steps into our observation post, where we’d sit and admire the skate tricks that the gangly, show-off boys performed.

One Wednesday afternoon we took our own roller skates there. We started off hesitant and clumsy. The boys teased us a bit, then forgot about us. Intoxicated by speed and the fear that we wouldn’t be able to brake in time, we stopped thinking about anything but the joy of gliding. It was winter, and it began to grow dark early. We were getting ready to go, we still had our skates on our feet and our shoes in our hands, our cheeks were on fire, we were out of breath but euphoric.

Out of nowhere a man appeared, wrapped in a big overcoat. He stood in front of us and, with a wide movement of his arms that made him look like an albatross, drew open the flaps of his coat, leaving us speechless before the grotesque sight of his swollen penis extending through the open zipper of his trousers.

Caught between complete panic and hysterical laughter, Asia leapt up, and I followed her, but we both fell flat on our faces, thrown off balance by the skates we’d forgotten we were still wearing. By the time we stood up, the man had disappeared, like a ghost.

My father made a few more brief appearances in my life. On his return from some trip to the other side of the world, he popped over to our apartment to wish me a happy eighth birthday. He arrived with a gift I hadn’t dared hope for: the convertible Barbie camper van that all little girls my age dreamed of. I threw myself with gratitude into his arms and spent the next hour unpacking it with the conscientiousness of a collector, thrilled with its banana-yellow exterior and fuchsia-pink interior. It came with over a dozen accessories, a sliding roof, a fold-down kitchen, a deck chair, and a double bed.

A double bed? Calamity! My favorite doll was single, and no matter how much she might stretch out her long legs on her folding chair, exclaiming what a gorgeous day it was, she was going to be crushingly bored. Camping on your own is no fun. Suddenly I remembered a redundant male specimen I’d long ago put away in a drawer, a redheaded Ken with a square jaw, a kind of swaggering lumberjack in a checkered shirt, with whom Barbie would surely feel safe when she was camping in the wild.

It was nighttime. Time for bed. I placed Ken and his lady love side by side on the bed, but it was too hot. I had to take off their clothes first, so they were more comfortable, given the heat wave. Barbie and Ken had no body hair, no genitals, no nipples, it was very odd, but their perfect proportions compensated for this slight defect. I pulled the blanket over their smooth, gleaming bodies and left the roof open to the starry night sky.

My father got up from his chair to leave. He straddled the camper van as I was busily putting everything back in the miniature picnic basket, and then he kneeled down to peer under the awning. A teasing smile warped his face as he pronounced the obscene words.

“Fucking, are they?”

Now it was my cheeks, my forehead, my hands that were fuchsia pink. Some people would never understand the first thing about love.

At the time my mother was working for a small publishing company whose offices occupied the ground floor of our building, three streets from my school. When I didn’t go home with Asia, I liked to have my after-school snack in one of the secret corners of this lair, which brimmed with a great jumble of staplers, rolls of tape, reams of paper, Post-its, paper clips, and all kinds of colored pens. A veritable Ali Baba’s cave. And then there were the books, hundreds of them, piled up any which way on the rickety old shelves, packed into boxes, gathering dust in the windows, photographed and turned into posters to hang on the walls. My playground was the kingdom of books.

The atmosphere in the courtyard at the end of the day was always merry, especially as the days grew longer. The gardienne, the building’s caretaker, would bring out a bottle of champagne from her lodge, set up garden tables and chairs, and an assortment of writers and journalists would hang out there until night fell. All these beautiful people, so cultivated, brilliant, spiritual, and sometimes even famous. It was a marvelous, charmed world. Other professions, those of my friends’ parents, of our neighbors, seemed dull and routine in comparison.

One day I too was going to write books.