Camille Laurens

A Times of London story reports “France’s notoriously lofty literary world is watching in slack-jawed amazement as the country’s leading female writers lunge at each other with daggers drawn in a ferocious battle about plagiarism.” The contest is between Camille Laurens, who wrote a novel called Phillipe in 1995 about the loss of her infant child, and Marie Darrieussecq, who wrote a novel called Tom Est Mort in 2007 about a woman who loses an infant child. To further complicate matters, both writers share not only a publisher, POL, but an editor, Paul Otchakovsky.

Actually, the fight started three years ago, when Laurens reviewed Darrieussecq’s book and accused her of “psychological plagiarism.” She wrote, “Reading Tom Is Dead, I had the feeling that it had been written in my bedroom, that she [Darrieussecq] had sat on my chair, lain in my bed.”

But Darrieussecq fought back,calling the charges “vile,” and cited lots of other authors who had written about the loss of a child. (Although the Times report fails to go into detail, it appears the texts only had one line in common: “I don’t want another [child]; I want him, the same one.” Meanwhile, another leading French writer, Marie NDiaye, also “stepped forward to accuse Darrieussecq of ‘imitating’ her work,” too.

But the case seemed — abruptly — settled when editor Otchakovsky sided with Darrieussecq and fired Lauren by telling the Le Monde newspaper he would no longer publish her books. All has, apparently, been quiet ever since.

Marie Darrieussecq

Until this week, when both women published books about the fight, shocking observers who thought they’d been off working on new novels. But Darrieussecq has instead written “a studious analysis of literary theft” while Laurens’ has produced “a thinly veiled fictional account of a novelist who is dropped by her publisher after accusing a young rival of plagiarism.”

According to The Times, Laurens’ book is a moving account but “seems calculated to embarrass her former editor.” Meanwhile, Darrieussecq, who is also a practicing psychoanalyst, writes in her book that behind every charge of plagiarism is “the crazed desire to be plagiarised.”

But perhaps Darrieussecq should keep practicing: What about when someone has actually been, you know, plagiarized?