my life with marcel proust

Catherine Cusset

Gallimard, 240 pages, 2025

🏅 2025 Prix Léo Scheer

🏅 Prix Céleste Albaret

Why you should take a look at it:
√ A funny, inspiring, and brilliant self-portrait of a reader
√ An intimate and ingenious exploration of Proust’s emotional, social, and literary universe
√ By the acclaimed author of Life of David Hockney: A Novel

“I have read In Search of Lost Time three times in its entirety: at age 15, as the great novel of love; at age 20, as the great novel of society; at age 50, as the great novel of the writing word.”

So begins Catherine Cusset’s funny, intimate, and subtle account of her lifelong relationship with Proust’s masterpiece. At various stages of her life, the novel has been a constant companion, from which she has drawn life lessons, inspiration, and comfort; “a magnifying glass” that has enhanced her understanding of love, society, memory, and her own identity as a reader and writer.

 In the chapters on love, Cusset recalls the madly infatuated teenager she once was who recognized herself in the “obsessive way of loving” that characterized the narrator Marcel’s bond with Gilberte. A few years later, less tormented by passion, she marvels at Proust, the extraordinary painter of social classes, and appreciates his humor, its palette ranging from the most subtle irony to savage comedy. Finally, in her fifties, she pays homage to a genius devoted to his craft, in the absence of any initial recognition, and who faced, like many writers, the painful experience of rejection.

 This vivacious, self-reflective memoir in the form of the portrait of a reader also offers a precise and rich analysis of the novel in which Cusset addresses themes such antisemitism and Proust’s treatment of homosexuality.

One does not need to have read or attempted to have read Proust to be inspired by Cusset’s admiration and affection for the author of In Search of Lost Time, and, more broadly, her love of literature. Like her, we may discover for ourselves that Proust seems to know everything about us, and understands us better than we comprehend ourselves.

Catherine Cusset is an award-winning, best-selling author of fifteen novels, including Le problème avec Jane (Grand Prix des lectrices d’Elle 2000); Confessions d’une radine; Un brillant avenir (Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2008); L’autre qu’on adorait (Finalist for the Prix Goncourt 2016). Vie de David Hockney (Prix Anaïs Nin 2018; republished in 2025 with illustrations by the British artist) was published in 2019 by Other Press under the title Life of David Hockney.