25 February in the Basque Country, it’s 25°C at lunchtime, weather straight out of science fiction. The apple tree is in blossom alongside the camellia, and the whole countryside is bursting with mimosas, successfully replanted after the great freeze of 1986 that killed them all – I was 17 then, sledging on the slope below the house.

A book of hours was originally, in the Middle Ages, a Catholic devotional book used to follow the liturgical rituals of the canonical hours, containing prayers, psalms and images. Today, the press, the media and social networks keep count of the military strikes and the dead; they echo the world’s noise and fury, and there’s no need for me to add to it here. The world flares up in places with grim regularity, and like so many others on this Earth, several times a day I take in my dose of orange flashes and blasts through my chosen channels. For now, the news doesn’t make me jump from my chair to run for shelter, as it does for writers in other countries, so I count myself privileged. In the Basque Country, where I was born, the calm is so deafening that my neighbours are amazed I go back to Paris, ‘into all that stress’ – but I love Paris, I love its rhythm, I love walking through it at a brisk pace. Living in a city so beautiful and so alive is an occupation in itself. I also love Paris because I can leave it often.

I spent the first two months of 2026, first in India, then in Iceland. In these two antithetical countries, I met people who don’t frantically consume information from the moment they wake up. The Jaipur Literature Festival may well be the best book fair in the world; but all around that immense frenzy of reading lies meditative India, the high hills of Rajasthan, the cows, the monkeys, leopard tracks, temples by the thousand. I’ll spare you my cliché of India, a country my books often take me to – and which I left to cool my neurons in a writing residency in the heart of Iceland. In the same way, thanks to my books, I’m a regular visitor to Iceland. An ideal country for writing... But at night in that isolated house on the edge of a sublime lake, I was afraid. As the ice froze and thawed, the lake groaned, and little ice‑bells tinkled. Iceland is a haunted land, especially on nights lit by the northern lights – visually splendid, but an atmosphere too magical; my insomnia returned, bringing its procession of spectres.

I’ve chosen the Avenir typeface to write this book of hours. Avenir is modern in a way that feels almost tautological. The stems of the letters are thin, the vowels are nicely rounded; Avenir soothes me, and I can clearly see the colours of the letters.

I see a in green, e in dark grey, é in beige, i in yellow, o in red, u in blue, y in grey, and the consonants in black. Synaesthesia is a slight neurological quirk, fairly common: one person in 2,000 is a synaesthete. Rimbaud made a famous poem out of it – ‘A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels’... At school, because I didn’t see the letters in the same colours as my brilliant predecessor, I raised my hand to ask about the discrepancy; but my teacher didn’t understand what I meant. She read Rimbaud’s poem as a reverie or a metaphor.

It was while volunteering at the Institut Pasteur for a study on synaesthesia that another test revealed I’m also prosopagnosic. This learned term – from the Greek prosopon, meaning ‘face’ – refers to a visual disorder characterised by the inability to recognise faces. It’s far less poetic, and far more disabling, than synaesthesia. The height of my prosopagnosia came one day when my son got dirty at nursery and the staff changed his sleepsuit. I was looking for a baby in blue, and I didn’t recognise my own son – now dressed in red... A deeply awkward and embarrassing moment.

My grandmother, Amatxi, died on 29 February 2000 – the extra day of a leap year. Amatxi was a little bit witchy, but spent her life striving to be respectable, right down to the tips of her nails, which she painted with care despite all her manual work. Last night she spoke to me, in French and in Basque... A treasure of a dream, the kind one remembers... Amatxi carefully kept my first three books, the ones she lived to see published. She regretted that they were ‘too difficult’ for her. She left school at 11. I think of her when I make sure that my literary rigour – my ambition to craft the right sentence – isn’t aimed only at an elite.

I’ve never kept a diary. As a teenager in the 1980s, I recorded one on cassette tapes. Writing down things that had already happened bored me. I was already passionately in love with fiction, that freedom to imagine parallel worlds in order to better reveal our own. Non-fiction caught up with me over time. ‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished’, says Philip Roth. It also happens that a family can take pride in it. And for my mother, the sense that my sentences offer her a little justice, after she lost her first baby because of a medical error. All my books, fiction or not, revolve around that void, around a dead child, around the brother who preceded me into nothingness.

I won’t talk about prosopagnosia but about another recognition problem, this time an auditory one: thirty years ago, it took me a split second to recognise a National Front representative; fifteen years ago, about thirty seconds (usually as soon as the word ‘immigration’ came up); it now sometimes takes me two minutes. The normalisation of their ideas and their supporters terrifies me. Is fascism becoming normalised, or is the norm becoming fascist?

A vast blue sky over Paris. I’ll be able to walk about peacefully, at whatever pace I choose. And tonight, if I wish, I’ll be able to go home calmly without having to grip a key between my fingers to fend off a possible attacker, as I learned to do at the age of 19 in a self-defence class. Truismes, my first novel, was born of my youthful anger at being seen not as a human being, but as an available body. In public, the male gaze felt all‑pervasive. The concept of street harassment would have helped me understand what was happening to me every day; but the term didn’t exist in the 1990s of my youth. That any man might feel entitled to speak to me, even politely, to stop me on my way, to comment on my appearance or on my mere presence, even to follow me, even to touch me – as often happened, with all sorts of men – it was a staggering reality, yet presented as a fact of life. It was up to us, the girls, to adapt. Asking men to change their behaviour was simply out of the question. These concepts – street harassment, sexual harassment – would have helped me understand that I wasn’t alone in facing this restriction on my freedom to move, to study, even to think. I write while walking, in a kind of reverie; and the men who felt entitled to speak to me would interrupt me. They unsettled me and forced me to devise strategies simply to be left in peace. For young women, being in the street means having their thoughts constantly interrupted.

I’m 57. The harassment stopped abruptly for me ten years ago – with my first streaks of white hair. Now it’s my daughters’ turn, and it began before my very eyes: a man on the bus tried to touch my twelve‑year‑old’s bare thighs. She was wearing shorts – it was very hot, a June heatwave – but do I really have to justify my twelve‑year‑old daughter’s right to wear shorts? When that man was the only person at fault, the only one behaving inappropriately. There is a whole body of literature waiting to be written – new, dynamic, exciting – about the way half of humanity, women, see the world. And the other good news is that men, too, can write new kinds of books: shaped by a masculinity that imagines the world without needing to direct it, conquer it, possess it – a masculinity of gentleness, alliance, vulnerability. No subject is inherently reserved for men or for women. Even the virile Balzac wrote wonderful pages on breastfeeding in his Letters of Two Brides. Come on, gentlemen – a little nerve, a little imagination! Anything is possible if you shed the overly tight garment of supremacy.