In my neighbourhood bookshop, La Galerne, the shelves are well organised. On the ground floor, there’s a corner for foreign literature and another for French literature, with the latest releases right at the front. For nonfiction and essays, you used to have to go downstairs. But two years ago, they put a new table in front of the French literature corner for feminist essays and memoirs. A prime spot for people to grab a piece of the revolution without thinking about it too much. This change took a wild turn when local genius Annie Ernaux won the Nobel prize in 2022. Where should we put her work: in the crowded space for new French literature or the feminist memoir table?
This dilemma is now a regular question in France. The Anglosphere and other European countries have been wrestling with it over the past two decades, but here the line between fiction and nonfiction has only just begun to vanish in the minds of authors and their editors. Should we put a new table between the two? It would be a perfect spot for great autofiction such as Édouard Louis’s or Christine Angot’s novels. Or deeply personal nonfiction such as Alice Coffin’s Le Génie Lesbien or Adèle Yon’s bestseller Mon vrai nom est Élisabeth – her first novel and a literary quest to reveal the patriarchal violence suffered by the author’s great-grandmother. More than 150,000 copies have been sold since its release in February.
Much of the new work released this year falls in such a literary no man’s land. In 2025, 484 new novels hit the market in France. Many of the authors chose to shine a light on their matriarchal figure. Amélie Nothomb – one of the most prolific and creative novelists in the country – wrote about her mother in Tant mieux. Emmanuel Carrère, best known for his disturbing and eccentric novel The Moustache, did the same in Kolkhoze. Raphaël Enthoven (generally more prolific on foreign politics than literature) wrote about his mother and her sickness in L’Albatros. Matthieu Niango’s Le Fardeau explores the peculiar story of his mother, born in a Nazi maternity ward. Others chose to focus on an absent paternal figure: Anne Berest in Finistère takes the opportunity of his father approaching his last breath to truly get to know him; in Jacky, Anthony Passeron knits a patchwork of the few memories his father created in his childhood before vanishing into thin air.
This convergence of so many authors into a similar theme was the main angle of media coverage during the autumn literary season. “The literary season firmly focused on the family” (Radio France), “Literary season 2025: 9 books on family roots” (Vogue), “Our Selection of 7 Powerful Novels About Family Roots, Secrets, and Legacies” (Pélerin), “A literary season that puts light on the ancestors” (Nouvel Obs). It came as no surprise that when the literary prizes began to be awarded, the elite of the Germanopratin acknowledged the effort of authors to expose their roots so sincerely.
On 4 November, the prestigious Goncourt prize went to La Maison vide, in which Laurent Mauvignier explores the drawers and cupboards of his rural family home to tell his family story through the lives of his grandmother, great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother. “Notably, the four finalist novels draw on autobiographical sources. We are therefore far from the ‘work of prose imagination’ that the Goncourt prize claims to distinguish,” wrote Elisabeth Philippe, critic for the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Obs. “But who will complain, since this criterion is no longer particularly relevant in an era when genres are happily hybridising?”
From 1903, the Goncourt prize persisted through a great metamorphosis in french literature: in 1919 Marcel Proust won for In Search of Lost Time, his novel of seven volumes flirting with autobiography. In 1977, the author Serge Doubrovsky invented a word for this new way of writing another self: “autofiction”. Since then, in the creative writing classes offered at dozens of universities, students are increasingly taught this approach to write about untold stories from their perspectives – more than they are taught to write fiction from scratch (even if the “scratch” is always personal) or copy US or English personal essay writers, such as Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit or Deborah Levy.
Anne Pauly is one of them. In 2020, she published her first novel, Avant que j’oublie, inspired by the death of her own father. Like many others, she was amazed to see so many books focusing on parents and family this year. But not completely surprised. “When I wrote my book, the father figure was a big subject. We were justifying our fathers’ conduct or ways of being or not being present. Through my novel, I was looking to go past the faded colours of the ‘ideal father’. After #MeToo and the Pelicot rape trial, it is now time to go past the invisibility of our mothers and grandmothers.”
She said she saw in this collective retreat from classic fiction a real panic and desire to put the record straight. “The last people who witnessed Nazi barbarism are dying and we are entering an Orwellian post-truth era, not to mention that a robot knows better than us what to cook for supper. More than ever, we have an urge to hold tight to a disappearing world.” In the Anglosphere, “autofiction” and the turn to memoir was often dismissed as self-involved navel gazing. But in France it has hit its stride at a much different time. Perhaps traditional fiction is being put aside for a while in favour of plainly confronting the world. These authors invite us to start a real dialogue within ourselves and open our drawers: because how can we write and read good stories without knowing our own history?