Bodily Dis-ease in Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Two Case Studies

This article examines two twenty-first-century autobiographical accounts of the intense — and ultimately life-threatening — mental and bodily dis-ease endured by two young French women from adolescence into early adulthood. Annick Loupias’s La Tortue sur le dos (2001) and Émilie Durand’s Ma folie ordinaire (2006) are phenomenologically rich and visceral testimonies to their authors’ experiences of anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, other forms of self-harm (inter alia, self-cutting and self-burning), and even suicide attempts. I argue that, in common with the texts of many other French female writers who have approached these subjects in the last two decades, their value is not so much literary as more broadly cultural, allowing important sociopolitical and medical insights about these markedly gendered illnesses which have seen an inexorable rise in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but which are still often misunderstood, even by educated readers, and even by the healthcare professionals who attempt to treat sufferers. The article sets these texts in a material, extra-diegetic context, ascertains the aetiologies of the pathologies they inscribe, draws out some of the key insights they afford about those pathologies, and identifies some of the formal means by which these insights are conveyed.