Becoming a (trans)national celebrity writer? Negotiating proximity and distance/(dis)location in the nonfictional work of Leïla Slimani between 2017 and 2021

This thesis explores Franco-Moroccan writer Leïla Slimani’s understudied ‘non-fictional’ texts published between 2017 and 2021: Sexe et mensonges (2017; 2021), Paroles d’honneur (2017), and Le parfum des fleurs la nuit (2021). As the texts cut across genre and geography, dealing with a variety of themes from sex, sexuality, and gender, to cultural encounters, contemporary art, and museums, this thesis interrogates Slimani’s engagement with different spatial contexts – namely, genre, geography, and gender – throughout these four years. By book-ending this ‘non-fiction’ period, after Chanson douce (2016) and before Regardez-nous danser (2022), this thesis maps Slimani’s trajectory, exploring how her literary celebrity has rapidly grown in France, Morocco, and beyond. It considers issues of audience expectation in the context of constrained agency placed on writers perceived to be of North African heritage in France. Consequently, this thesis interrogates whether Slimani’s reception is enhanced in most quarters because she is seen as politically ‘unthreatening’ in the French context. It argues that Slimani’s engagement with the aforementioned spatial contexts – through dislocation, disidentification, absence, or presence – reveals limits to her positionality that are often overlooked by critics. This thesis maintains that these limits should be accounted for since Slimani engages with various transnational, socio-cultural, and political spheres from within the French cultural and political mainstream. These spheres mostly centre on France and Morocco, where unequal negotiations of power still play out, revealing the tensions of authorial (self-)fashioning; namely, how audience expectation affects Slimani’s trajectory and vice versa. This thesis demonstrates that what Slimani engages with influences how cultural representations are spatially mapped to different audiences in France, Morocco, and beyond. By doing so from a position of ideological and cultural proximity to France, this is not without consequence as Slimani risks replicating and solidifying normative, Eurocentric socio-cultural and political frameworks.