SOURCE: "The Life of Marguerite Duras," in The New York Times Magazine, October 20, 1991, pp. 44-6, 52-3, 60-1.

In the following essay, which is based on an interview with Duras, Garis discusses how the author's views and life experiences have impacted her writing.

Novelist, playwright, film maker, Communist, outrageous social commentator, Marguerite Duras has awed and maddened the French public for more than 40 years. Considering her impoverished childhood in Vietnam, her participation in the French Resistance, her Communism and ultimate disaffection with the Party, her two marriages and many liaisons, the near-fatal cure she underwent for alcoholism in 1982, and, especially, her miraculous recovery from a five-month coma induced by complications from emphysema in 1988, it is reasonable to suggest that Marguerite Duras is a force of nature.

Her 48th work, The Lover, published in 1984 when she was 70, was a best seller not only in France and throughout Europe, but in...