The Margot Affair: A Novel

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

This was not the story of François Mitterrand, once president of France, and his hidden daughter, Mazarine. I knew better than to imagine the grandeur of a president. Mitterrand had split his holidays between both families, the women and children stood together at his funeral, whereas Father’s worlds existed on parallel planes, never intersecting.

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

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

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

Such was the nature of hope—believing that change wasn’t swift and dramatic, that certain routines were immutable.

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.

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.

Anouk couldn’t have come from a more different family. Raised in the affluent town of Le Vésinet, in the suburbs of Paris, she went to boarding school and spent her summers in Saint-Tropez, driving on a motorcycle with her friends, sometimes wearing nothing but shoes. When they retired, her parents moved to a beautiful house in Burgundy.