La Bleue Sagan Et Fils

Sagan and SonRights sold to Czech Republic (Motto) and Russia (Eksmo)Françoise Sagan died on 24th September 2004. She left tax debts of over a million Euros and a body of work - comprising some thirty novels and a dozen plays - on the point of being quite simply liquidated. Sagan was in the process of disappearing altogether when in 2006 Denis Westhoff, her only son, decided to accept this unusual, poisoned chalice of an inheritance. It turned out to be a real assault course and meant he had to retrace the steps of the "charming little monster" who was catapulted onto the literary and media scene in 1954 by her first novel, Bonjour tristesse (Hello Sadness). Westhoff then realised that the public woman - who was said to be so profligate with her money and to love living dangerously and, preferably, at full tilt - was someone he had been unaware of for many years. He had been loved and brought up by a mother careful to protect him from the fall-out of her status as a legendary writer-star. He felt a growing longing to dot the "i"s, and to tell things as he saw and heard them, not as people chose to interpret them. Here he visits key places, relates anecdotes, remembers moments of high emotion - be they happy or painful - as well as private conversations, and draws portraits of the people who were really close to Sagan, including his grandparents, the Quoirez, and his father, the nonconformist Robert Westhoff; in so doing he sheds a completely new light on one of the major figures of French literature. This book has no ambition to tell the truth about Sagan, but a truth. The one offered by a son who has finally dared to describe freely and happily the life he lived with a mother not quite like any other. Denis Westhoff is a photograph. Sagan and Son is his first book.