SOURCE: “The Art of Fiction XCVI: Francine du Plessix Gray,” Paris Review, Vol. 29, No. 103, Summer, 1987, pp. 132–72.

In the following interview, Gray discusses her background, the autobiographical elements of her fiction, and her creative process.

I first met Francine du Plessix Gray in Morocco in 1983. Gray had interrupted the completion of her third novel, October Blood, and was en route to Paris to finish her articles about Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie and the French Resistance, which would appear in Vanity Fair that fall and for which she would receive the National Magazine Award for Best Reporting.

Gray was born in the French Embassy of Warsaw in 1930 where her father, a specialist in Slavic languages, was a member of the French diplomatic corps. After he died in 1940, his plane shot down by Fascist artillery, she and her mother emigrated to America and her mother married Alexander Liberman. Her mother was...