The Margot Affair: A Novel

Madame Lapierre came from an upper-class, highly educated family. For her entire life she had lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, close to Passy, and I struggled to picture Father in those spaces. I imagined him sitting on the edge of a leather couch, or always staring out of a window, wanting to be elsewhere. I was relieved he wasn’t from Paris

You have an extraordinary mother, Father often said, as though she was better than all the others. A mother is not a friend, Anouk liked to say, proud of this distinction. What happened to daughters like us? Would we flee our families, wanting to be far away, wishing to carve out a life that was ours alone, far removed from where we came from? Or w

Her favorite was Trouble Every Day, the only horror film Claire Denis ever made, in which an American man goes to Paris with his wife for their honeymoon. But the trip has a darker purpose.

Who would I be today if I was raised by married parents, if our little family wasn’t weighed down by a secret? I envied Madame Lapierre and her sons, and their clean conscience. And yet, was it terrible to admit that I’d also loved the travails of our life, the inconsistency of Father’s affection, the hardness of Anouk’s hands when they pulled on m

and you can’t understand what it was like. A marriage is a closed world. Anyone who thinks they can explain it to an outsider is a fool.

But what you may not know about my father is that he never really took a day off, not for his wife and sons and not for us. He believed in the value of work. Even during holidays, he was attached to his phone, reviewed papers after everyone had gone to bed. Because he felt this enormous responsibility to take care of us all. He was afraid. What if

Because you experience the world differently at your age. Your family, this upheaval with your father, is everything to you. You haven’t been in love yet, have you? Your world is still contained, small and intense, and every change to the status quo feels like a rug is being pulled from under your feet. It knocks the air from you. I can see it on y

I’d sit on the chair beside your bed. Sometimes you wouldn’t fall asleep for an hour or two. You would hold my hand against your cheek, and when I tried to remove it, thinking you’d fallen asleep, you’d snap your eyes open. You’d glare at me in the dark, daring me to leave. Father laughed and shook his head. Once you asked if I could cut off my han

Were we shaped by the spaces in which we existed? At home, our apartment was all boundaries: each wall encasing us without the risk of being seen, a private space when Father was there. The boundaries had been there my entire life, and I’d always respected them. Outside it was more complicated. In the past three years we’d stopped going to restaura

The day was winding down by the time I arrived at Parc de Belleville. It was the second highest point of elevation in Paris after Sacré-Coeur, overlooking the city with a view of the monuments. Belleville had been the last standing barricade of the Commune de Paris, home to Edith Piaf and Georges Perec.