SOME CHILDREN SPEND THEIR DAYS CLIMBING TREES. I spent mine in books. This was how I drowned the inconsolable sorrow in which my father’s abandonment had left me. Romance and passion filled my imagination. I was far too young for the novels I read, and I understood little of them except that love makes you suffer. Why would anyone want to be destroyed so prematurely?

I finally had a brief glimpse of adult sex one winter’s night when I was about nine years old. My mother and I were on vacation in a small family-run hotel in the mountains. Friends of ours were in the room next door. We had a large L-shaped room, and I was sleeping on a cot in the area around the corner, behind a thin dividing wall. After a few days my mother’s lover joined us, unbeknown to his wife. He was handsome, artistic, smelled of pipe tobacco, and wore old-fashioned vests and bow ties. He took no interest in me whatsoever. He was frequently irritated to find me doing headstands in front of the television on Wednesday afternoons, when he had managed to escape the attention of his employees so he could spend an hour or two with my mother in her bedroom at the back of our apartment. One day he said to her, “Your daughter is completely wasting her life. You ought to sign her up for activities instead of letting her destroy her brain cells watching garbage all afternoon!”

He arrived in the late afternoon. I was used to him turning up unexpectedly and no longer resented it, but he wasn’t the kind of man I could imagine on skis. After dinner I went to bed, leaving the adults to their perplexing conversations. As was my habit, I read a few pages of my book before I fell asleep, my exhausted muscles suddenly lighter than snowflakes, floating, swaying once more down the pristine slopes as sleep carried me off.

I was awoken by the sound of sighing, the friction of bodies and sheets, whispers; I could make out my mother’s voice and, with mounting horror, the more peremptory intonation of the man with the moustache. “Turn over” was the only fragment that my ears, suddenly exquisitely keen, managed to distinguish.

I could have put my hands over my ears, or indicated with a light cough that I was awake. But I lay there, petrified, the whole time their lovemaking lasted, trying to slow the rhythm of my breathing and praying that my heartbeat couldn’t be heard from the other end of the room, plunged into ominous shadow.

The following summer I spent the vacation in a house in Brittany belonging to a classmate who was to become my best friend. His cousin, a girl a little older than the two of us, joined us for a few days. We slept in a room furnished with bunkbeds, a playhouse, and lots of secret hiding places. No sooner had the adults left the room after one last goodnight kiss, hardly had the bedroom door closed, when, beneath our tents fashioned out of old plaid blankets, our guilty games—though still relatively chaste—would begin. We had a collection of accessories that seemed to us incredibly erotic: feathers, scraps of fabric, velvet and satin torn from old dolls, Venetian masks, silken cords. One of us would be designated the consenting prisoner, while the other two would set about stroking the powerless victim, who was usually blindfolded and handcuffed, nightgown lifted or pajama bottoms lowered, with various objects that we kept hidden under the mattress during the day. We thrilled at these delicious caresses, and sometimes even furtively placed our lips, screened by a piece of fabric, on a nipple or a smooth pubic mound.

We didn’t feel at all embarrassed in the morning; the memory of our nocturnal diversions faded away while we slept. The next day we carried on bickering just as always, playing out in the countryside with the same innocence. After we watched the film Jeux interdits at the Cinéclub, constructing cemeteries for animals—moles, birds, and insects—became our most absorbing activity. Eros and Thanatos, always.

Julien and I were in the same class, and our games went on for several years, at his house or mine. During the day, we fought like cats and dogs, brother and sister. In the evening, in the darkness of the bedroom, on our little mattresses laid on the floor, we came together like magnets, as if under a magic spell that transformed us into insatiable, lustful beings.

At night, our bodies were drawn to each other as we sought a pleasure that was never satisfied, but the quest itself was enough to make us keep blindly reaching out with the same gestures. What began as clumsy and furtive became, as time went on, increasingly focused. We became masters of the art of contortion, and when it came to devising this new gymnastics, our imagination had no limits. We never reached the paroxysm that we intuitively sought—our knowledge of our bodies was too limited—but we would remain on the cusp of pleasure for long minutes, exquisitely attentive to the effect of our touch on the other, each filled with confused desire, the fear of a tipping point that never came.

Sixth grade signaled the end of our insouciance. One day a red viscous liquid trickled down between my thighs. My mother said to me, “Now you are a woman!” Since my father had fallen off the radar, I had begun desperately trying to attract men’s attention. It was a waste of effort. I was completely unattractive; I lacked the slightest physical allure. Not like Asia, who was so pretty, the boys whistled whenever we approached.

Julien and I had both just turned twelve. In the evening, before we moved on to more daring games, we sometimes embraced languorously, but our intimacy never took on the contours of love. There was not the slightest feeling of tenderness between us; we showed no affection to each other during daylight hours. We never held hands, which seemed more daunting than all the things we did at night in our goose-feather alcove. We were anything but “betrothed” as our parents liked to say.

In school, Julien began keeping his distance. Sometimes one of us would go over to see the other, though we might have ignored each other for weeks before that. Julien would tell me about some girl he was in love with. I would listen without letting him see how upset I was. No one liked me. I was too tall, too flat-chested, my hair hung all over my face; one day in the schoolyard a boy even told me I looked like a toad. Asia moved away. Like every girl my age, I bought a notebook and began keeping a journal. As adolescence laid its awkward hands on me, I felt it only as an all-consuming solitude.

To top it all off, the little publishing house on the ground floor of our building went out of business. To make ends meet, my mother took a freelance job proofreading travel guides from home. She spent long hours poring over pages by the kilometer. We had to be careful with money now. Turn out the lights, avoid waste. There were fewer parties; friends rarely came over anymore to play the piano and belt out songs at the top of their voices; my beautiful mother grew dull, withdrew from the world, began drinking too much and spending hours in front of the television. She put on weight, let herself go. She was in such a bad way, she couldn’t see that her single life was as much of a burden for me as it was for her.

A father, conspicuous only by his absence, who left an unfathomable void in my life. A pronounced taste for reading. A certain sexual precocity. And, most of all, an enormous need to be seen.

All the necessary elements were now in place.