['Responses'] is a lazy person's autobiography—an 'imaginary interview' elegantly altered … from the various actual interviews Françoise Sagan gave between 1954 … and 1974, when nothing much happened. But has much happened in 20 years?

['Responses'] invites you to imagine her on a plateau of time, a lost world with odd messages from outside …, a world where drink, gambling, lovers, friends, novels—even the car crash that nearly killed her, even the birth of her cherished son—seem just aspects of her loneliness and her loathing of security….

Though she complains about her myth, there's a dreamy, ritual vagueness in her opinions…. She sounds sometimes like an inverted Barbara Cartland, with expensive Scotch, scars and scruffiness replacing the expensive champagne, rosy cheeks and frills.

What saves Sagan from suspended animation, however, is her shrewdness. Not the tolerance she claims to have acquired …, but the sharp rejections she has always been able...