The Margot Affair: A Novel

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.

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.

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.

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

We are like snakes, she said. Throughout our lives we shed our previous selves like old skins. We’re always changing, never the same individual. Nothing, not even a terrible thing, can fully consume us.

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

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

She spent her childhood in Le Vésinet, a wealthy town west of Paris, the opposite of where Father was raised. Her parents had a studio nearby in Saint-Germain-en-Laye and as soon as she was old enough to leave, she moved into the studio.