Early life Sagan was born on 21 June 1935 in
Cajarc,
Lot, and spent her early childhood in Lot, surrounded by animals, a passion that stayed with her throughout her life. Nicknamed 'Kiki', she was the youngest child of bourgeois parents – her father a company director, and her mother the daughter of landowners. Her family spent World War II (1939–1945) in the
Dauphiné, then in the
Vercors. Her paternal great-grandmother was Russian from Saint Petersburg. The family had a home in the prosperous
17th arrondissement of Paris, to which they returned after the war. She obtained her baccalauréat on the second attempt, at the
cours Hattemer, and was admitted to the
Sorbonne in the fall of 1952. She was an indifferent student, and did not graduate.
Career During a literary career lasting until 1998, Sagan produced dozens of works, many of which have been filmed. She took the pseudonym "Sagan" from a character () in
Marcel Proust's
À la recherche du temps perdu (
In Search of Lost Time). Sagan's first novel,
Bonjour Tristesse (
Hello Sadness), was published in 1954, when she was 18 years old. It was an immediate international success. The novel concerns the life of a pleasure-driven 17-year-old named Cécile and her relationship with her boyfriend and her widowed playboy father. Sagan maintained the austere style of the French
psychological novel, even while the
nouveau roman was in vogue. The conversations between her characters are often considered to contain
existential undertones. In an interview in 1960, she said her main themes were "solitude and love." In his study of Sagan’s cultural impact, French scholar, Flavien Falantin traces the links between Sagan and existentialism and its most-noted philosopher,
Jean-Paul Sartre. Though never his disciple, in a chapter titled “Love Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre” in her memoir,
With Fondest Regards, Sagan recounts how important the philosopher’s writings were to her when she was young. Sagan became friendly with Sartre and included a moment in her second novel,
A Certain Smile, when the narrator “threw herself” into Sartre’s “very beautiful book,
The Age of Reason.” Sartre returned the compliment: her writing was “innovative” and expressed “something new, drawn from her own experience.” Her success, he felt, was “justified.” She then had a long-term relationship with fashion stylist
Peggy Roche. She also had a male lover,
Bernard Frank, a married essayist and began a long-term affair with the French
Playboy editor
Annick Geille, after Geille approached Sagan for an article for her magazine. Fond of traveling in the United States, Sagan often was seen with
Truman Capote and
Ava Gardner. On 14 April 1957, while driving her
Aston Martin sports car at speed, she was involved in an accident that left her in a coma for some time. During her recovery she became dependent on the pain medication she was prescribed, a topic she wrote about in her nonfiction work,
Toxique. 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. In 2010, her son Denis established the
Prix Françoise Sagan.
Death Sagan’s health was reported to be poor in the 2000s. In 2002, she was unable to appear at a trial in which she was convicted of
tax fraud in a case involving the former French President
François Mitterrand and she received a suspended sentence. Sagan died of a
pulmonary embolism in
Honfleur, Calvados on 24 September 2004 at the age of 69. At her own request she was buried in Seuzac (Lot), close to 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." ==Film==