Julia Kerninon - A female manifesto for a writer’s life (...) a lyrical reminder of the hard (and indeed often unrelated) work it takes to be a wordsmith

Julia Kerninon, A Respectable Occupation,

Trans.by Ruth Diver, Les Fugitives, 2020.

Read ‘Whats on Julia Kerninon’s Bookshelf?’ in Albertine

‘The best early training for a writer is an unhappy childhood,’ Hemingway famously said. Julia Kerninon, one of France’s most acclaimed young novelists, tells an altogether different story in a poetic account of her pursuit. Her journey through her formative years entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, resulting in a vibrant ode to reading, and to writing as a space for discovery (as well as a ‘respectable occupation’), peppered with fine portraits of her disjointed yet loving family. From her native Brittany to the city of Shakespeare and Company, to a seaside café on the Atlantic coast, to Budapest and back, the author conjures a fluid, feminine answer to A Moveable Feast.

'Borne along by Kerninon’s long, joyful sentences (nimbly translated by Ruth Diver), it’s a winning account of her journey from reader to writer.' — Francesca Carington, Tatler

'A female manifesto for a writer’s life (...) a lyrical reminder of the hard (and indeed often unrelated) work it takes to be a wordsmith, which is justified daily in the joy of putting pen to paper and writing book after book.' — Mia Colleran, The Irish Times

‘Marvellously contagious’ — Le Point

‘Julia Kerninon lays down sentences as definitive as dictums, impresses with her maturity of style and command of narrative. The reader plunges in, with the same voraciousness she puts into her writing.’ — ELLE (France)

‘The greatest writers are also the greatest readers. Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Jeanette Winterson – they all read, as Woolf put it, ‘to refresh and exercise [their] own creative powers.’ They can’t stop themselves from writing about reading. They have origin stories of how reading and writing became as necessary as breathing. Julia Kerninon’s A Respectable Occupation joins the shelf of these biblioautobiographies; books on how writers crave books, how books beget books, how tricky it is to move from the position of the reader to that of the writer, and stand there feeling you’ve earned the right to call yourself, finally, a writer.’ – Lauren Elkin

The daughter of a pair of bohemian bookworms, Kerninon grew upto share their bibliomania and decided, aged five and a half, she would become a writer. Opening with a pilgrimage to the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare & Co, her story entwines the French and Anglo-Saxon literary traditions, while sketching fine portraits of a disjointed yet most loving family.