On the Limits of Autobiography and Not Getting to Age

How Hervé Guibert did not Go Gently in À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie and Cytomégalovirus

Authors

  • Sophie van den Elzen Utrecht University

Abstract

This paper discusses two works by Hervé Guibert, a French author who was an influential voice in the public debates surrounding AIDS in the early 1990s. It examines how his post-diagnosis novels play with the autobiographical genre, rejecting the conception of autobiography as a monument to the aged man, a stable subject reflecting on and recasting his life as purposeful and fulfilled. Instead, Guibert highlights his lack of control or authorship over his life and confronts his own youth mainly through the antithetical way he portrays his friend and mentor, Michel Foucault, reclaiming subjectivity in a series of political texts.

Author Biography

  • Sophie van den Elzen, Utrecht University

    Sophie van den Elzen is a PhD Candidate at Utrecht University, working on an NWO-funded project supervised by Prof. dr. Ann Rigney. She received her MA(Res) in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University, having spent semesters at UC Berkeley and University of Toronto.

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Published

2026-05-04

Issue

Vol. 30 No. 1 (2017): Ageing Lines

Section

Masterclass

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

van den Elzen, S. (2026). On the Limits of Autobiography and Not Getting to Age: How Hervé Guibert did not Go Gently in À l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie and Cytomégalovirus. FRAME, Journal of Literary Studies, 30(1), 89-100. https://platform.openjournals.nl/FRAME/article/view/27342