IT’S INCREDIBLE. I’D NEVER HAVE BELIEVED IT POSSIBLE. After so many romantic disasters, such a struggle to accept love unhesitatingly, the man whom I eventually met and with whom I now share my life was somehow able to heal my many wounds. We have a son who is just entering adolescence. A son who has helped me grow. Because you can’t remain fourteen years old forever once you become a mother. My son is handsome, with a gentle expression in his eyes, a bit of a dreamer. Fortunately, he never asks me much about my childhood. Which is just as well. In the imaginations of our children, at least when they’re young, our lives only began with their birth. Perhaps they sense, intuitively, that there is a shadowy zone it’s better not to venture into.

Whenever I go through a period of depression or suffer an uncontrollable panic attack, I tend to take it out on my mother. Pathologically, I am constantly trying to force an apology from her, or at least an iota of contrition. But no matter how much I berate her, she not only never concedes; she digs her heels in even more. Whenever I try to make her change her mind by pointing out all the young teenagers around us—“Can’t you see, a fourteen-year-old girl is still a kid?”—she replies, “That’s irrelevant. You were much more mature at the same age.”

And then, the day I asked her to read the manuscript of this book, dreading her reaction more than anyone else’s, she wrote back: “Don’t change a thing. This is your story.”

Now G. has reached the venerable age of eighty-three. As far as our relationship is concerned, the statute of limitations has long passed and the moment has come when—blessed be the passage of time—his fame has finally dimmed, and his most transgressive books have sunk into oblivion.

Many long years passed before I decided to write this book, and even more before I could bear to see it published. I wasn’t ready until now. The obstacles appeared insurmountable. First there was the fear of the consequences such a detailed account of this episode would have on my family and my career, which are always difficult to evaluate.

I also had to overcome my fear of the tiny circle of friends who might still be prepared to protect G. This was not trivial. I was worried that if the book were published, I’d be subject to violent attacks not only by his fans but also by some ex-soixante-huitards, veterans of the May ’68 revolution, who might feel they were being attacked for having signed his notorious open letter; and perhaps even a few women opposed to the new so-called neo-Puritan discourse on sexuality; in other words, all the self-appointed critics of the policing of public morals.

To give myself courage, I clung to this argument: if I wanted to assuage my fury once and for all, and reclaim this chapter of my life, writing was without doubt the best way to do it. Over the years a few people have suggested the idea. Others, meanwhile, in my own interest, have tried to dissuade me.

It was the man I love who finally persuaded me that writing meant becoming once more the subject of my own story. A story that had been denied me for too long.

To tell the truth, I am surprised that someone else, some other young girl from that time, hasn’t already written her own book in an attempt to correct the interminable succession of marvelous sexual initiations that G. describes in his books. I’d have loved someone else to do it instead of me. Someone more gifted, cleverer, more impartial too. It would certainly have unburdened me of a great weight. The silence apparently corroborates what G. has always claimed, offering proof that no teenage girl has ever had reason to complain of having been in a relationship with him.

I don’t think that’s really the case. I believe that it is extremely difficult to extricate oneself from someone’s hold, even ten, twenty, thirty years later. It is hard to shake the feeling of self-doubt, the sense of being complicit in a love that one felt oneself, in the attraction that we once aroused in him; this is what has held us back, even more than the few fans G. still has in the Parisian literary world.

By setting his sights on young, lonely, vulnerable girls, whose parents either couldn’t cope or were actively negligent, G. knew that they would never threaten his reputation. And silence means consent.

But on the other hand, to my knowledge, not a single one of his countless mistresses has ever chosen to write a book recounting the wonderful relationship she had with G.

Does that tell us something?

What has changed today—something that men like he and his defenders complain about constantly, excoriating the general atmosphere of puritanism—is that following the sexual revolution, it is now, at last, the turn of the victims to speak out.