"Isn't it ... particularly difficult to 'speak' of your work?" Frederic-Yves Jeannet asks Helene Cixous in this fascinating book of interviews. " I]t's only in writing, on paper, ... that I reach the most unknown, the strangest, the most advanced part of me for me. I feel closer to my own mystery in the aura of writing it," Cixous responds.

These conversations, which took place over three years and cover the creative process behind Cixous's fictional writing, illuminate the genesis and particular genius of one of France's most original writers. Cixous muses on her "coming to writing," from...