Becoming Mathilde

You’ve said this novel didn’t start as a novel at all. Where did it actually begin?

With my grandmothers — both of them, which still astonishes me when I say it out loud. Neither one set out to leave me a plot. They left me notes. Handwritten, tucked into books and boxes, the kind of thing you find years later and suddenly can’t stop reading. Fragments of family heritage, half-finished stories about women who reinvented themselves when the world gave them no good options. I didn’t understand, at first, that I was holding the beginning of a book. I just knew I couldn’t put the pages down, and that I wanted to know what happened to the women in them. Eventually I realized I was going to have to write the rest myself. They didn’t leave me a story. They left me a woman standing at the edge of her own life, and a blank page where the rest of her should be. I just picked up the pen.

Without spoiling anything — what is Mathilde actually about?

At its heart, it’s about a woman who loses almost everything — her husband, her work, her name, in a sense — and discovers that the only way back into her own life is through someone else’s. It’s a novel about grief wearing a disguise, about who gets permission to be heard and who has to invent a way around that question. It is also, I hope, a love story, and a very French one: a little wicked, a little tender, not in a hurry to explain itself.

The English novel is called The Beautiful American — a title Americans tend to love. Why does the French edition carry a different name entirely?

Because that title simply doesn’t travel. Americans hear The Beautiful American and lean in — there’s a wink in it, a little irony, a sense of someone watching herself from the outside. Say it in French and the irony evaporates. Rather than force a phrase that would land flat, I gave the French edition the thing that was always truer anyway — her name. It also happens to be my maternal grandmother’s real name. Mathilde isn’t a translated title. It’s what the book was called before it had a marketing department.

A lot of your titles have that hand-written look across your covers — the lettering never quite reads as typeset. Is that something you do yourself?

Every one of them, yes, always. I hand-paint the titles for all of my novels myself — it has never once been outsourced. For each cover I spend countless hours on the lettering, trying dozens of versions of how a name should lean, how a letter should open up, before I find the one that actually feels right. Some people see a font. I see a book I now have to go and earn. Each cover is a little bit my baby before a single chapter is even finished — I fall in love with the shape of a title long before I’ve done anything to deserve it.

Paris is almost a character in Mathilde. How much of the city in the book is real?

Nearly all of it, though not always in the way people assume. There’s a scene at Lapérouse, actually — an almost-dinner that never quite happens, which was very deliberate. It’s drawn from something that happened to me: plans I’d made and then had to cancel for work, a table I never sat down at. So much of this book carries that particular nostalgia, scenes built around what almost happened rather than what did. I still gave it the real details — the private salons, the hôtel particuliers, the mirrors they say were scratched by women testing whether the diamonds they’d been given were real. One of the book’s most important scenes happens at Café de la Paix, which I chose on purpose — it’s impossible to sit there and not feel like you’re being watched, and that is exactly the condition my heroine is in for most of the novel.

Was there a Paris spot you slipped into the book just for yourself?

I let myself one indulgence, too: a passing mention of Café de Flore, partly because I love it, and partly because Hemingway practically lived there. I wanted at least one page where my character and his ghost are breathing the same air.

And beyond the title — Mathilde isn’t simply the English novel translated into French. What makes it different?

I didn’t want a translation. I wanted the French version of my voice — the style of this one is closer to Colette than to F. Scott Fitzgerald. So every chapter was rebuilt from the beats outward: same events, same people, but rewritten entirely in a French sensibility, tighter and more seductive than the English. Part of that is the formality between two people, and English simply doesn’t have a word for it. You just say “you,” and the word carries no memory of where two people actually stand with each other. French makes you choose, every time you open your mouth. Vous holds a little distance — a politeness that can be respect, or armor, or both. Tu is what happens once two people finally stop performing for each other. In this book, the moment someone slides from vous into tu is the moment something has already shifted between them, often before either of them would admit it out loud. I got to write that shift sentence by sentence, in a way no English dialogue tag could ever manage. It’s the same story. It simply learned to breathe differently.

What do you want someone to feel on the last page?

I want them to feel the way I felt holding my grandmothers’ notes — like they’ve been let in on something private that was waiting, patiently, for the right reader. And then I want them to go back to the first page and notice everything they missed the first time, the way you do with a city you thought you already knew.