The French author Nolwenn Le Blevennec’s first novel, As the Eagle Flies (published in France in 2021), recounts what its antiheroine calls ‘the commonplace story of a short-lived romance in the offices of a failing magazine’. The narrator betrays her partner, a widower twenty years her senior with whom she is raising two children, for a colleague. While some practitioners of autofiction can be cagey about source material, Le Blevennec, the online editor of the broadsheet L’Obs, volunteered that the story was based on first-hand experience – to which one might say, with a mock-Gallic shrug, so what? 

But there’s more. When her partner, the distinguished journalist Claude Askolovitch, learned that Le Blevennec planned to write about her affair, he revisited the episode from the cuckold’s perspective in a memoir, A son ombre (2020). All things considered, Le Blevennec doesn’t come out of it too badly. Nevertheless, she objected to her portrayal. At this point, the only party we have yet to hear from is the former lover, whose dour fictional counterpart skulks about the pages of As the Eagle Flies ‘rock-hard and throbbing’. 

Friends and Lovers is an exploration of female friendship and a study of the perils of autobiographical fiction. Armelle, the angsty narrator, is a journalist and an aspiring screenwriter who blurs ‘the boundaries between reality and fantasy’. The narrative, structured around two trips to islands, meanders between two points in