With less imagination than Proust but with a frankness that makes Proust and most autobiographers seem positively Pecksniffian, [Violette Leduc] writes five pages of her journal every day, wrestling with her soul and her sanity for le mot juste. Poverty, frustration in love, doubts about her capacity to write, have given her the stuff from which books can be made without resorting to the masks and evasions of popular fiction.

La folie en tête [Mad in Pursuit] carries her through World War II, a nightmarish imprisonment, friendship with Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Genet, the will o' the wisp allurements and disappointments of the literary life, and a passion for a book collector whose indifference to her provoked one of those crises usually leading their victims to suicide or cynicism.

Her book sometimes resembles a cluttered Victorian house whose jumble of knicknacks drew the eye away from...