She had become, we were told, a tragic figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death, in 2004, were full of the sense of this failure. They have described existence, but they have failed to transcend it. It is as though they have crushed our illusions about human destiny. A kind of disappointment afflicts our feelings about writers, as it does not those about other artists. Scott Fitzgerald, for instance, virtually described his own funeral in “ The Great Gatsby.” Vaguely, the reader comes to see the writer as nothing more than one of his or her own characters the suspicion that literature occurs entirely within the bounds of personality is confirmed. It is one of the ironies of the writer’s predicament that self-expression can become fate. Photograph by Bert Hardy / Picture Post / Getty Françoise Sagan sitting by the Seine, in Paris, 1955.
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