On winning the Prix Goncourt, Paris, 2009. © Reuters.

Marie NDiaye’s books are often violent, but the violence takes highly particular forms. A person might find herself suddenly called a different name by everyone around her, like Fanny in Among Family (1990, translation 1997), or pregnant with a strange creature, as does Nadia in My Heart Hemmed In (2007, 2017). A lawyer might try to comprehend an act of infanticide; a woman working in a hotel might find herself in a sexual relationship with her boss, who has their encounters filmed. The shocking nature of such scenarios is offset by NDiaye’s prose, precise and formal, with a restraint that adds to her work’s unnerving quality: a placidity where one might expect horror. Claire Denis, with whom NDiaye wrote the screenplay for the film White Material (2009), has described her work as “unbearably sweet.”

In person, NDiaye is warm and gracious. She likes talking about babies, dinner parties, her friends’ books; she often wanted to know what I was reading, and to discuss movies she enjoyed, like Anatomy of a Fall and Mulholland Drive. That congeniality often seems like a kind of self-protection. NDiaye, whose popularity outside her home country is steadily growing, is one of France’s most famous writers. Her first novel was published in 1985, when she was seventeen; she has published twenty-nine books since. Her play Papa doit manger (Daddy’s got to eat), about a father’s unexpected return to the family he abandoned a decade earlier, was performed at the Comédie-Française in 2003, the first time the theater had produced work by a living female writer. In 2009, her novel Three Strong Women (translation 2012), the linked stories of a lawyer, a housemaid, and a schoolteacher, told between Senegal and France, won the Prix Goncourt, France’s most prestigious book prize, catapulting her to a new tier of literary celebrity. This, combined with the fact that she is one of the few Black writers to have achieved mainstream success in France, means that she is often asked to weigh in on current events, but she bridles against the media’s tendency to turn novelists into pundits. “When⁠—especially during an election⁠—I read the opinion of some novelist or another, I think, Leave this person alone so they can write,” she told me. (Her brother, Pap Ndiaye, is France’s former minister of national education and youth and one of the country’s foremost historians.) 

NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, to a white French mother and a Senegalese father who left the family when she was an infant, and was raised in the suburbs of Paris. She has spent most of her adult life away from the city⁠—for many years in rural areas of France and then in Berlin, where she lived with her then husband, the writer Jean-Yves Cendrey, and their three children. She now lives alone, in a bright apartment in the twelfth arrondissement. Our conversations took place over the course of a year and a half, during which time the living room, featuring at first just a yellow couch and chair, gradually filled⁠—with a map of the city, images of the sea, a tall red lamp, plants, exhibition catalogues, and books. Sometimes we were interrupted by a call about a furniture delivery. On the table was a vase that had been given to her by friends; she didn’t think it was her style, but liked that they had considered that it might be. The room has a view of a bookstore across the street. When I stopped by for a final visit, the store had a picture of NDiaye in its front window. 

INTERVIEWER

Did one character in Ladivine (2013, 2016) come to you first? 

MARIE NDIAYE

I’m not sure I can remember. Remind me who the main characters are again? 

INTERVIEWER

There’s Ladivine, her daughter, Malinka, who renames herself Clarisse, and Clarisse’s daughter, also named Ladivine. 

NDIAYE

And what was your question? 

INTERVIEWER

The book is about a matriarchy, and I wondered if there was one woman around whom you built the others. 

NDIAYE

Really, I don’t remember. It’s strange⁠—I’d say that I suffer from hypermnesia, although I try to avoid that word, when it comes to my own life. I remember every detail⁠—dates, what people wore … I have an extremely vivid memory of my own childhood. But with the books I write, I forget basically all their details. It’s like when you chat with someone on a train⁠—you forget about them when the trip is over. 

INTERVIEWER

But surely you read each novel countless times, going through multiple drafts⁠—you never think about your characters once you’re finished with them? 

NDIAYE

Never. That anecdote about Balzac, that just before his last breath he called for Doctor Bianchon⁠—I find it astonishing. I know I won’t call out for any of my characters on my deathbed. 

In any case, I rarely go back over what I’ve written. There are no drafts. I revise very little. 

INTERVIEWER

So how do you write? 

NDIAYE

You mean literally? 

INTERVIEWER

Yes. Do you have a ritual or routine? 

NDIAYE

Well, I sit over there, at the table, or maybe in bed. Or not in bed, but on my bed. I don’t need an office, just my computer. It’s okay if I’m interrupted⁠—if the phone rings, say. It doesn’t bother me to be bothered. When the children were still little, I was interrupted all the time. Mostly, back then, I worked during their school hours, but I maintained a similar kind of discipline even after they left home. My working sessions have always been short, about two hours, so they must be two very productive hours. After that, I feel I can go no further. 

INTERVIEWER

Because you get stuck? 

NDIAYE

No, I’ve just gone as far as I can. I’ve never had that feeling of block, maybe because I spend so much time dreaming things up before I sit down to write. Only when the characters are refined enough in my mind can I put them into words. I generally enjoy chores like cleaning, cooking, shopping for groceries, because, while my hands are occupied, I can also entertain vague thoughts about my characters. Of course, there are also activities that don’t allow for that, because you have to concentrate on what you’re doing⁠—taking care of children, et cetera. But when I’m driving, for example, I can truly focus on both navigating⁠—if it’s a simple route⁠—and what I’m writing. 

INTERVIEWER

Is the approach the same when you’re writing a play or a film versus a novel? 

NDIAYE

There’s more dialogue with a play, of course. And all the plays I’ve written have been commissioned, which will generally involve some constraints⁠—it’ll be for three actors, say, who are twenty-five, forty-five, and seventy⁠—which gives the writing a path to follow. When I was writing for the actress Nicole Garcia, I liked that I could picture her face, hear in my mind the way she speaks, imagine the way she throws her hair back. With Saint Omer (2022), Alice Diop and Amrita David, who edits Alice’s films, came up with the idea to ask me to join them on their adventure. We met for two or three weeks, during which time we worked together every day in the producer’s office. I love movies, but I’m not that interested in writing scripts⁠—I find all that reviewing and revising a bit annoying. What interests me more is talking about the characters with other people, which is mostly what we did. 

INTERVIEWER

Did you already know about the case of Fabienne Kabou, which inspired the film? 

NDIAYE

Oh yes. Stories like that always fascinate me. I mean, a mother who seems to love her child, who seems to treat her well, who nourishes her, then kills her … It’s so impossible to fathom that it’s captivating. Working on the film, I read everything I could find about the mother, about the murder, about infanticide itself. She was truly sick, of course⁠—and the courts can’t adjudicate that kind of sickness. But she spoke very, very clearly. She was cold, glacial. She never apologized, never broke down. In the trial scene we wrote, there’s hardly a word said by that character that wasn’t said by the real woman. None of the dialogue is made-up, not what the lawyers say, or the judge, the president of the court … It’s almost at the level of documentary. 

With her brother, Pap, ca. 1972. Courtesy of Marie NDiaye.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think about good and evil? 

NDIAYE

If I think about good and evil, it’s definitely without the capital letters. But I’m very interested in writing about goodness⁠—I’ve read a lot of the Bible, for instance. I’m not a believer, but the Gospels, and the figure of Jesus, have appealed to me since I was a child. In one of the last scenes in Vengeance Is Mine (2021, 2023), the protagonist, Maître Susane, is attacked by someone who takes her bag⁠—in my head, it’s really Jacob wrestling with the angel. 

INTERVIEWER

What made you return to the subject of infanticide in Vengeance Is Mine? 

NDIAYE

Well, the film wasn’t my idea, but it gave me the idea for the story, which I handled in my own way. 

INTERVIEWER

Once you had the idea, how did you start the book? Do you tend to begin with a sentence, or perhaps a scene? 

NDIAYE

Not a sentence or a scene so much as a vision, one that’s been scampering about my brain for several months. It begins vaguely, but as it becomes sharp, its presence signals that I should write about it, and this vision leads to the creation of a character who inhabits it and makes it believable. For Vengeance Is Mine, my vision was this⁠—there’s a woman in her office, and a man enters, and he’s distraught. I didn’t know what he was doing there, or who he was, but that image carried my imagination toward the story. I find the writing process to be generative in and of itself. I’m very often surprised by the routes it might take. I don’t go from point A to point B knowing exactly what will happen. 

INTERVIEWER

So there’s no plan? I’m thinking of My Heart Hemmed In⁠—the couple alienated from their community without explanation, and the husband’s mysterious wound. It feels almost allegorical. 

NDIAYE

I’d completely forgotten about the wound! I’m sure that must have been some kind of allegory⁠—but of what? 

I do love parables, and how, compared to fables, which have a message⁠—that one must respect one’s parents or whatever⁠—they try to make us understand something essential about life, but without such explicit moralizing. I recently read John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra. It’s an allegorical novel whose title references a version of this Babylonian tale. A servant returns from the market and says, Master, lend me your horse so I can go far away from here⁠— I saw Death in the marketplace. So the master lends the servant his horse, and the servant leaves the city. Then the master goes to the marketplace and sees Death and⁠—why am I telling this stupid story? Anyway, Death tells the master, I was astonished to see your servant here, for we have an appointment tonight in Samarra! Whatever we try to escape will invariably find us.