After ten years away, my return to Paris brought with it a new and critical perspective on the city I once called home. This book was born from that distance—geographical, emotional, and cultural—and from a personal quest to understand how my origins shape my relationship to love and sexuality.
At first, I approached this project as a kind of intimate sociological inquiry. I multiplied the encounters—mostly through dating apps—filming them, observing, taking notes. But gradually, I let go of the camera and returned to writing, my more familiar language. The stories began with my own, then opened up to include the voices and lives of others. One by one, these short stories unfolded like a series of encounters—each a fragment of truth, each a question posed to the world.
Through this collection, I aim to give voice to those who often go unseen, or whom society prefers not to see. The stories explore the accidental clash of social classes, the inversion of gender roles, the place of madness in love, emotional and sexual precarity, and the endlessly shifting definitions of intimacy and partnership.
The characters that inhabit these pages are as ordinary as they are marginal, as detestable as they are familiar—each in search of the other, in their own flawed, desperate, or tender ways.