IT WAS THANKS TO G. THAT I DISCOVERED, AT MY EXPENSE, HOW books can be a snare to trap those one claims to love, how they can become a blunt instrument for betrayal. As if his appearance in my life had not been devastating enough, now he had to document it, falsify it, record it, brand it forever with his crimes.

The panicked reaction among primitive peoples when their image is captured can give rise to amusement. Now I understood better than anyone the feeling of being trapped in a deceptive likeness, a reductive version of oneself, a grotesque, contorted snapshot. To seize the image of the other with such brutality is indeed to steal their soul.

G.’s novels, in which I was supposedly the heroine, appeared in bookshops when I was between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, at a rhythm that left me no respite. After that came the volume of his diary covering the period of our relationship, including some letters I wrote when I was fourteen; two years later the paperback version of the same book; then a collection of breakup letters, including mine. That’s without counting all the newspaper articles and television interviews in which he reveled in saying my first name. Later there would be another volume of the contents of his little black notebooks, in which he returned almost obsessively to the subject of our separation.

Every one of these publications, whatever the context in which I found out about it (there was always some well-intentioned person excited to let me know), bordered on harassment. For everybody else it was the beating of a butterfly’s wings on a tranquil lake, but for me it was like an earthquake, an invisible tremor that upended the very foundations of my life, a blade plunged into a wound that had never scarred over, a hundred steps backward in the progress I thought I had made in getting on with my life.

When I read the volume of his diaries that was largely devoted to our breakup, it triggered a terrible panic attack. G. had begun to instrumentalize our relationship by depicting it through the prism that most flattered him. His brainwashing tactics were positively Machiavellian. In his diary he transformed our love affair into the perfect fiction. That of a libertine transformed into a saint, of a rehabilitated pervert, a chronically unfaithful man who got his second chance, a fiction that he wrote but never lived, published after the requisite interval—that is, the period of time necessary for life to be duly dissipated in a novel. I was the betrayer, the woman who had ruined this perfect love, who had destroyed everything by refusing to go along with this transformation. The woman who had not wanted to believe in this fiction.

I was stupefied by his refusal to recognize that this love carried within it his own failure, from the first moment, that it had no possible future because the only thing G. was able to love in me was a fugitive, transitory moment: my adolescence.

I read the book in one sitting, in a fugue state, a confused stupor of powerlessness and rage, horrified by his lies and bad faith, by his propensity for self-victimization and the way he shifted responsibility for any blame away from himself. I held my breath as I got to the final pages, as if some invisible force was pressing on my solar plexus and my throat. All the vital energy drained from my body, as though absorbed by the ink of this vile book. I only managed to calm down after a shot of valium.

I also learned that, in spite of my categorical refusal to be in contact with him, G. continued, deviously, to stay informed about what I was up to. Through whom, I don’t know. In the pages of his diary he even insinuated that after we had broken up I’d begun hanging out with a junkie, thanks to whom I had ended up in a vortex of the most abject debauchery, just as he had predicted I would when I left him. He, my protector, had done all he could to keep me away from the hazards of youth.

This was how G. justified his role in the lives of the adolescent girls he seduced. He kept them from becoming lost souls, social rejects. All those poor, hapless girls whose lives he had tried, in vain, to save!

No one told me at the time that I could press charges, sue his publisher, that he didn’t have the right to publish my letters without my consent, nor to write about the sex life of someone who was a minor at the time of the relationship, making her recognizable, not just by the use of her first name and the initial of her last but with a thousand other little details. For the first time I began to see myself as a victim, though I couldn’t put my finger on the word for that hazy feeling of powerlessness. I also had the vague sense that not only had I been used to satisfy his sexual urges during our relationship, but now I was being used to cast a favorable light on him, enabling him, through no efforts of my own, to continue to broadcast his literary propaganda.

After I read the book, I had the profound sense that my life had been ruined before I had even lived it. With a stroke of his pen my history had been erased, carefully wiped away, then revised and rewritten in black and white, and published in an edition of a thousand copies. What link could there be between this paper character, fabricated from beginning to end, and the person I really was? Turning me into a fictional character, when my adult life had barely begun, was a way of preventing me from spreading my wings, of condemning me to remaining trapped in a prison made of words. G. must have known this. But I suppose he simply didn’t care.

He had immortalized me; what could I possibly have to complain about?

Writers do not always profit by becoming famous. It would be wrong to imagine they are like other people. They are much, much worse.

They are vampires.

I gave up any literary ambition I’d ever harbored.

I stopped keeping a diary.

I turned my back on books.

I no longer had any interest in writing.