Queer Places:
Seuzac Village Cemetery Cajarc, Departement du Lot, Midi-Pyrénées, France
Françoise Sagan (21 June 1935 – 24 September 2004) – real name Françoise
Quoirez – was a French playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. Hailed as "a
charming little monster" by François Mauriac on the front page of Le Figaro,[1]
Sagan was known for works with strong romantic themes involving wealthy and
disillusioned bourgeois characters. Her best-known novel was her first –
Bonjour Tristesse (1954) – which was written when she was a teenager.
Sagan was married twice. On 13 March 1958, she married her first husband, Guy Schoeller, an editor with Hachette, who was 20 years older than Sagan. The couple divorced in June, 1960. In 1962, she married Bob Westhof, a young American playboy and would-be ceramicist. The couple divorced in 1963; their son Denis Westhoff was born in June 1962.[7] She then had a long-term relationship with fashion stylist Peggy Roche. She also had a male lover, Bernard Frank, a married essayist obsessed with reading and eating. She added to her self-styled "family" by beginning a long-term affair with the French Playboy editor Annick Geille, after Geille approached Sagan for an article for her magazine.[8]
Fond of traveling in the United States, she was often seen with Truman Capote and Ava Gardner. On 14 April 1957, while driving her Aston Martin sports car, she was involved in an accident that left her in a coma for some time. She also loved driving her Jaguar automobile to Monte Carlo for gambling sessions.
In the 1990s, Sagan was charged with and convicted of possession of cocaine.
At various times of her life, Sagan was addicted to a number of drugs. She was a long-term user of prescription pills, amphetamines, cocaine, morphine, and alcohol. When the police came for an inspection of her house, her dog Banko showed cocaine to them, and also licked the cocaine. Sagan told the police, "Look! He likes it too."
In 2010, her son Denis established the Prix Françoise Sagan.
Her health was reported to be poor in the 2000s. In 2002, she was unable to appear at a trial that convicted her of tax fraud in a case involving the former French President François Mitterrand, and she received a suspended sentence. Françoise Sagan died of a pulmonary embolism in Honfleur, Calvados, on 24 September 2004 at the age of 69.[9] At her own request she was buried at her beloved birthplace, Cajarc.
In his memorial statement, the French President Jacques Chirac said: "With her death, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive writers – an eminent figure of our literary life."
She wrote her own obituary for the Dictionary of Authors compiled by Jérôme Garcin: "Appeared in 1954 with a slender novel, Bonjour tristesse, which created a scandal worldwide. Her death, after a life and a body of work that were equally pleasant and botched, was a scandal only for herself."[10]
My published books:
