Christine Angot’s ‘Incest’ Is a Radical Act of Confession

Mid-way through ’s pioneering, genre-bending novel, —originally published to shock and acclaim in France in 1999 and newly translated into English by —Angot’s lover laments, “I think of love and I feel invaded” Angot is known for using the facts of her life as the basis for her fiction, and it seems that to love her is, indeed, to invite a kind of invasion. (She was sued for literally “pillaging the private life” of a different lover’s ex-partner in her 2011 novel ). The line also evokes what it feels like to be immersed in Angot’s most taboo work, a cyclone of language and raw emotion that explores, among other things, an