de Rosnay, Tatiana 1961-

PERSONAL:

Born September 28, 1961, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France; daughter of Joël de Rosnay (a scientist and educator) and Stella Jebb; married; children: Louis, Charlotte. Education: University of East Anglia, B.A., 1984.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Paris, France. E-mail—tatianacom@hotmail.com; tatianderosnay@noos.fr.

CAREER:

Literary critic and author. Christie's (auction house), Paris, France, former press attaché; Vanity Fair (magazine), Paris, editor, until 1993; journalist for French edition of Elle magazine; literary critic for Psychologies Magazine.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

L'appartement témoin, Fayard (Paris, France), 1992.

Mariés, pères de famille: romans d'adultères, Plon (Paris, France), 1995.

Le dîner des ex, Plon (Paris, France), 1996.

Le coeur d'une autre, Plon (Paris, France), 1998.

Le voisin, Plon (Paris, France), 2000.

La mémoire des murs, Plon (Paris, France), 2003.

Spirales, Plon (Paris, France), 2004.

Moka, Plon (Paris, France), 2006.

Sarah's Key, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2007, French translation by Agnès Michaux published as Elle s'appelait Sarah, Heloïse d'Ormesson (Paris, France), 2007.

Author of the blogs Elle s'appelait Sarah, Le Blog du Prix Lilas, and Fig Tree Franglais by Tatiana. Sarah's Key has been translated into twenty languages.

ADAPTATIONS:

Film rights to Sarah's Key were bought by Hugo Films and Experience Films.

SIDELIGHTS:

Novelist Tatiana de Rosnay is the daughter of a French scientist and an English mother. Born in suburban Paris, she spent much of her early childhood in Boston, where her father was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For her college education, she traveled to England, where she earned a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of East Anglia. De Rosnay then returned to her native France, settling in Paris, where she worked for the auction house Christie's during the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, she was an editor for Vanity Fair, and then she joined the staff at Elle magazine. While also working as a literary critic for Psychologies Magazine, de Rosnay has established a successful career as a novelist on the side. Her contemporary fiction features ordinary people whose lives take unexpected, life-changing turns. De Rosnay's first eight novels remain untranslated and are in French, but she wrote her ninth, Sarah's Key, in her native English.

Several of de Rosnay's novels involve flawed male characters. L'appartement témoin, her first book, is about a self-involved and conceited man who believes he knows everything about life. That attitude quickly changes when a mysterious woman enters his life and he begins a life-altering trip across Europe and America to find her. Mariés, pères de famille: romans d'adultères is about how several women are affected by husbands who cheat on them. De Rosnay offers a novel with a twist in Le coeur d'une autre, which is about a misogynistic man who undergoes a remarkable transformation after he receives a heart transplant. The heart he is given is from a woman, and this fact causes him to reevaluate his life and change his perspective.

Not all the protagonists in de Rosnay's novels are flawed men, however. In Spirales, it is a woman who has an affair, with disastrous consequences. While making love, her paramour dies of a heart attack. Panicking, she flees only to become a murder suspect. Though somewhat less dramatic, Le dîner des ex, is about another flawed woman. Middle-aged Margaux decides one day to invite several of her former boyfriends to dinner, and the event stirs in her many regrets about the choices in her life. Other female characters in de Rosnay's fiction are simply the victims of unfortunate circumstances. In La mémoire des murs, for example, a woman becomes uneasy when she learns that she has moved into an apartment where a murder has occurred. Le voisin has a similar concept about a woman moving into a new apartment. In this case, however, she has a mysterious upstairs neighbor who harasses her relentlessly. In Moka, a meek woman changes drastically after her son is run over in a car accident and subsequently falls into a coma; she consequently becomes determined to find the negligent hit-and-run driver.

Sarah's Key is something of a departure for de Rosnay. It is also the first time she writes directly in her mother tongue, English. Previously, she has set her books in modern times, but here she alternates chapters between the present and World War II France. Julia is a journalist who has been asked to write a story about what happened to the Jews in France during the German occupation. Coincidentally, she discovers that her apartment was once occupied by a Jewish family that was deported to Auschwitz. All the family members died, with the exception of the daughter, Sarah. Julia decides to research the story, and what she discovers transforms her own feelings about her life and her unfaithful husband. A Publishers Weekly critic declared that Sarah's Key "beautifully conveys Julia's conflicting loyalties, and makes Sarah's trials so riveting." "Masterly and compelling, it is not something that readers will quickly forget," concluded Lisa Rohrbaugh in a Library Journal review.

De Rosnay told CA: "I first started writing novels when I was eleven years old, in 1972. I was already a book worm and several books had inspired me: The Diary of Anne Frank, Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, and Young Visters (sic) by nine-year-old Daisy Ashford. For my mother's upcoming birthday, I decided to write her a novel and she was most encouraging when she read "A Girl Called Carey," the eighty-page, handwritten story of a poor little rich girl in nineteenth-century London. So from then on, I wrote a book a year for my family. I was already then firmly convinced I was going to be a writer. But I did not seek publication till 1992.

"In my teens, I was influenced by Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Charles Baudelaire, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edith Wharton (although I knew I could never equal them!) Nowadays, I read many contemporary writers such as Ian McEwan and Tracy Chevalier, but I try not to be influenced and to let my own voice ‘speak!’

"I take notes when I am preparing a novel and while I am writing it. I write early in the morning and late at night. My first readers are my husband, Nicolas, and my close friends Laure and Julia, who have more or less read everything I've written, even the unpublished stuff! It takes me a year or two to write a novel.

"The most surprising thing I have learned as a writer is that you can really reach out and touch people, in every sense of the word. And that they want to thank you for it. A wonderful discovery!"

When asked which of her books is her favorite, de Rosnay responded: "I'm attached to all nine of my novels and to my unpublished ones! But I'd say Sarah's Key is the book which has lit up something in my life, something that I'll never forget.

"I love it when my readers tell me ‘they couldn't put my book down’ and had to stay up all night to read it! I also love it when my readers recommend my books to their friends and family."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January, 1997, review of Le dîner des ex, p. 827.

Library Journal, May 15, 2007, Lisa Rohrbaugh, review of Sarah's Key, p. 78.

Publishers Weekly, May 28, 2007, review of Sarah's Key, p. 38.

ONLINE

Tatiana de Rosnay MaPage,http://mapage.noos.fr/tatianaderosnay (May 1, 2008).

Tatiana de Rosnay MySpace Page,http://www.myspace.com/yansor (March 19, 2008).