Career
She published her first work, the book Le Pavillon des enfants fous, in 1978 after spending four years confined to a psychiatric hospital for anorexia nervosa. Critics praised her style of writing and her expressive, philosophically sophisticated articulations of systemic mistreatment and misunderstanding. Scholar Richard A. Mazzara likens her work to Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Herman Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf.