“By evoking my parents, I wanted to rediscover their hopes, their torments, their way of somehow discovering and constructing their life in this cosmopolitan and traditional society–modern but filled with superstitions, prejudices, and the heaviness of the past. How were they able to get rid of the weight that they had inherited, how had they been able to spare themselves from it? And above all, how were they able to bear leaving everything for good? Me, I needed to look again, to keep a continuity, to be there. Now that they are dead, I tell myself that I will only be able to console them by writing.” Colette Fellous in .

Join French writers Colette Fellous and Chantal Thomas as they discuss, Pièces détachées, Fellous’s last novel, in which she tells the story of her father’s decision to leave Tunisia in the wake of the massive exodus of Jews from Tunisia to France in the 1960s.

In French, Free and open to the public. No RSVP necessary.

Colette Fellous, a prominent French writer, publisher and a former radio producer at France Culture, was born in Tunisia and studied in the 1970s with the literary theorist Roland Barthes. Fellous is the author of more than twenty novels, including Aujourd’hui (2005), for which she received the Marguerite Duras Prize, and La Préparation de la vie (2014), in which she pays homage to Barthes.

Chantal Thomas is a stellar writer. She studied philosophy and was a student of Roland Barthes, who is also the subject of her most recent work of nonfiction (Pour Roland Barthes).
An 18th century literature expert and Sade, Casanova and Marie-Antoinette specialist, Chantal Thomas is Director of Research at the prestigious CNRS (National Center for Scientific Research). She has taught at Arizona University and Princeton as well as in Paris.
She is the author of several novels including Le Testament d’Orphée, Les Adieux à la Reine (Farewell my Queen, Touchstone), which won her the Femina Prize, and was made into a movie by Benoit Jacquot. She recently published The Exchange of Princesses with Other Press. The novel is also in the process of being adapted into a movie by Marc Dugain.