French novelist and dramatist who wrote her first and best-known novel, the international best-seller Bonjour Tristesse, when she was 18 years old.
Background
Sagan was born in Cajarc and spent her early childhood in Cajarc, surrounded by animals, a passion that stayed with her throughout her life. Nicknamed 'Kiki', she was the youngest child of bourgeois parents – her father a company director, and her mother the daughter of landowners. Her family spent the war in the Dauphiné, then in the Vercors. Her paternal great-grandmother was Russian from Saint Petersburg.
Education
Françoise Sagan educated at private and convent schools in France and Switzerland, Sagan attended the Sorbonne. She was an indifferent student, and did not graduate.
Career
The pseudonym "Sagan" was taken from a character ("Princesse de Sagan") in Marcel Proust's "À la recherche du temps perdu" (In Search of Lost Time). Sagan's first novel, "Bonjour Tristesse" (Hello Sadness), was published in 1954, when she was 18 years old. It was an immediate international success. The novel concerns the life of a pleasure-driven 17-year-old named Cécile and her relationship with her boyfriend and her adulterous, playboy father.
Among the novels that followed "Bonjour Tristesse" are "Un Certain Sourire" (1956; A Certain Smile), "Aimez-vous Brahms?" (1959), "Les Merveilleux Nuages" (1961; Wonderful Clouds), "Un Profil perdu" (1974; Lost Profile), "De guerre lasse" (1985; Engagements of the Heart, or A Reluctant Hero), and "Un Sang d’aquarelle" (1987; Painting in Blood). Most of Sagan’s novels feature aimless people who are involved in tangled, often amoral relationships. Almost all her protagonists are young women involved sexually with older, world-weary men or, less frequently, middle-aged women and their young lovers. Her plays, which resemble her novels in content, were generally well received. They include Château en Suède (1960; Castle in Sweden) and L’Excès contraire (1987; Opposite Extremes). She also wrote film scripts, short stories, and nonfiction.
Achievements
Views
Quotations:
"To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter."
When asked if she believed in love: "Are you joking? I believe in passion. Nothing else. Two years, no more. All right, then: three.”
"A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you."
"I have loved to the point of madness, that which is called madness, that which to me is the only sensible way to love."