More on the Novel Here:

Pour la peau is the autobiographical story of the passion of “Emma” for “E,” a man whose thoughts are never revealed. After their breakup, Emma puts their brief love into writing, to better preserve it, while also exorcising it by rendering it in fictional form. In mostly chronological order, Emma focuses on the man she loves, painting in careful strokes and minute detail a portrait of the man, and of the evolution of her feelings for him, from an initial repulsion, to a gradual appreciation, to the sudden moments when she falls in love.

Love, as the author relates in an interview, is at the same time a destruction and a construction of the individual. In Pour la peau, the narrator discovers she can love someone more than she ever thought possible despite his not fitting any of her preconceived ideas of a loved one; a flawed man, and much older than her. The love is destructive because she accepts things that are outside the limits of behavior she has always deemed important, all to melt into the other, to give up the self entirely, to think only of the well-being of the other. Indeed, E’s appearance first repulses her. His elbows are covered in scabs, which he picks. The lines on his face say he is a man who has self-destructed, fallen. He drinks too much, smokes too much, does drugs, and is also addicted to the woman who left him, though she will be the end of him. But E and Emma’s love has constructive elements, too: He is tender in a way she has never experienced, he is educated and traveled—he speaks of David Foster Wallace, and he lived in London for fifteen years—and he has a collection of music that adds, gradually, to what she sees in him. Their deepest love lasts only four weeks out of an endless summer; the rest is an unraveling. Emma describes in sensual and erotic prose how their bodies met, from the first time to the last, with every detail she can recall of how they made love, where, and when.

As one reviewer put it, the novel “helps us to overcome.” Pour la peau is the beautiful, seamless rendering of one woman’s survival, through writing, of a love gone. 

Emmanuelle Richard is the author of one other critically acclaimed novel, La légèreté, published by Éditions de l’Olivier in 2014.