Report on Myself

Book excerpt: Distinguished by the same charm and playful prose that helped make The Mystery Guest such a cult favorite with readers and reviewers, Report on Myself is the memoir that won Grégoire Bouillier the French Prix de Flore and universal acclaim. Here, Bouillier tells the whole crazy story of his life, from his conception in wartime Algeria to his gritty Parisian boyhood at the mercy of his working-class bohemian parents. With trademark pithy vignettes, he illuminates his life through the stories of his four loves, beginning at age nine with the bourgeois Marie-Blanche, younger sister of his best friend, and ending with the relationship that nearly destroyed him, the aftermath of which he chronicled to such great effect in The Mystery Guest. Shot through with indelible images, bad puns, and Bouillier's gift for drawing meaning from the seemingly innocuous coincidences of daily life, Report on Myself turns on a literary revelation (in this case, The Odyssey) that helps Grégoire decode the patterns laid out by his life, while teaching us a thing or two about love and literature along the way.