Some 30 years ago, Springora was a 13-year-old tagging along with her mother to a party. A man stared at her. “When I finally dared to turn toward him, he threw me a smile, which I confused for a paternal smile, because it was the smile of a man, and I no longer had a father.”
She refers to him as G.M. In France he was instantly recognizable as Gabriel Matzneff, the acclaimed writer whose sexual predilections for young girls and even younger boys were well known and regarded with fond indulgence. Matzneff wrote in his diaries, published in 1985: “Sometimes, I’ll have as many as four boys — from 8 to 14 years old — in my bed at the same time, and I’ll engage in the most exquisite lovemaking with them.” François Mitterrand declared the author a “hedonist inspiration.”
Springora met Matzneff at a party, but she shows us that the stage had been set long before. (…) “All the necessary elements were now in place,” she writes. “A father, conspicuous only by his absence, who left an unfathomable void in my life. A pronounced taste for reading. A certain sexual precocity. And, most of all, an enormous need to be seen.”
From The New York Times, 2021