the family story is popular

“In this literary season, another spoon for mom!” wrote Géraldine Mosna-Savoye, daily columnist Release, on September 17, 2025. “Literary return to school 2025: thank you Mom, thank you Dad (for the navel-gazing inspiration),” headlined Jean-Marc Proust in Slate (free online magazine), August 28, 2025. Pilgrim an editor-in-chief said to me: “So many books about family! Don’t you think that’s all there is now?” Not wrong. This year, this surge even overwhelms the fall prize selection (read the box at the end of the survey).

The reflection of individualism

Would French literature submit to the individualist and narcissistic spirit of the times, where everyone shares their lives on social networks and television sets? “We are in a world that has difficulty saying “we,” analyzes Francis Geffard, publisher at Albin Michel. Saying “I” is easier. Also simpler than imagining fiction. Especially since it seems to have difficulty competing with reality, which is beyond imagination!” Indeed, from the Trump presidency to fake news or artificial intelligence… political and technological revolutions can inhibit creation and encourage a return to one’s family.

However, the phenomenon is not new. On the one hand, writing about oneself and one’s lineage are part of the monuments of the French language: Montaigne, Rousseau, George Sand, Marcel Proust, Colette, Marcel Pagnol, Marguerite Duras… have all signed intimate works. But these authors were not part of the major movement of their time.

On the other hand, the golden age of the novel, in the 19th century, saw an influx of family novels, such as the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola, but without autobiographical connotations. “At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the trend was more towards vast frescoes, where generations follow one another,” explains Dominique Viart, professor of contemporary literature at Paris-Nanterre University. With sagas, like those of Roger Martin du Gard (The Thibaults) or Georges Duhamel (Chronicle of the Pasquier).»

Then, in the second half of the 20th century, the codes of narration were broken: these were the new novel, existentialism, the absurd… The family was not in fashion, we wanted to escape from it. She will return in the 1980s with writing about herself and her loved ones.

In the path of autofiction

The first notable book is The square, by Annie Ernaux, on her father, followed by Tiny lives, by Pierre Michon, about his grandparents. “These were rather brief texts, with a strong sociological emphasis,” analyzes Dominique Viart, “but this literary form gained in scope until the monumental novels of the new school year.” Even if authors, such as Édouard Louis, retain the brief form and the social analysis.

“At the end of the 20th century,” the professor continues, “archaeological writing was born: via letters, objects, archives, the writer turns into an investigator, trying to understand what happened. This coincides at a time when transmission was lacking, he explains: because of wars, the Shoah, entire generations were silent.”

Because they didn’t come back, or because it wasn’t possible to tell: too much pain, too much shame. Maybe we didn’t want to hear them.

Re-register in a lineage

As is often the case, it is the generations after us who take over. By signing with their pen a sort of act of reparation, these writers reinscribe themselves in a lineage. There were many among the nominees this fall.

Emmanuel Carrère, who evokes in his novel Kolkhoz, the flight of Russian and Georgian aristocrats during the Russian Revolution of 1917. Or Laurent Mauvignier, haunted in The empty house by the image of a shaved woman and the crossed out face of her grandmother Marguerite in family photos.

The Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens, for her part, brings to life in Night passengers a whole line of slave women, his distant ancestors, between Haiti and New Orleans, in the United States. As for Nathacha Appanah, born in Mauritius, she already recalled in The faded memory the living conditions of his grandparents, Indian coolies who came to work in the sugar cane fields, replacing black slaves, at the time of abolition.

Overcoming trauma

In his new story, The night in the heart, the Mauritian journalist and novelist addresses a major theme currently: violence against women, through three characters, including herself and a cousin. Because writing also allows you to overcome trauma. And participates in the movement to free women’s voices, launched with #MeToo.

These women victims wrote major books, to denounce their tormentors, lock them in pages and regain power over their lives. This is the case of Camille Kouchner (The big family) and Snow Sinno (sad tiger) who broke the incest taboo, after Christine Angot, in 1999. Or Vanessa Springora, who denounced the influence exercised over her by the writer Gabriel Matzneff (Consent).

But it’s not just women who sublimate their trauma: this October 15, 2025 was released by Albin Michel I was born of the devil, by Jean-Christophe Grangé, one of the masters of the French thriller, author in particular of Purple rivers. He tells how he grew up in the terror of a violent father: “I transformed my terrors into fictions, my fears into suspense. Evil – my father – can no longer touch me because I have transformed him into a book.”

These stories are carried by the fashion of psychoanalysis where, on the couch, we talk about our parents. The power of the works of Vanessa Springora and Emmanuel Carrère owes a lot to him. The same goes for Vanessa Schneider, senior reporter at World, who publishes Hard skin, on his father Michel, psychoanalyst.

What our ancestors tell us

Other authors were interested in psychogenealogy, popularized by Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, in 1988, with her essay Ouch, my ancestors! The principle? We carry the secrets of our ancestors, and it is by bringing them to light that we can get rid of what prevents us from living. “Writing, far from being a simple outlet, acts as a refuge, an enveloping space, a velvet medicine, where the body finds ways to express itself,” explains Régine Détambel, author and bibliotherapist.

Thus, the writer Anne Berest relied on psychogenealogy to make her family the terrain of an exploration which continues from book to book. After Gabrielle, on his great-grandmother, The postcard on members of her family who disappeared in Auschwitz, she wrote this fall Finistère, on his paternal branch.

“I’m building a literary family tree,” she confides. Each book is a branch, each story explores a transmission, visible or invisible, conscious or underground, which links one generation to the next. I question intimate memory as much as collective memory.”

Diverse in their origin and background, the stories of filiation also vary in their form: genealogical investigation, confession, chronicle of trauma, recomposed childhood memories, tension between the individual trajectory and collective destiny, illumination of reality from an intimate experience. And among this multiplicity, major literary works, which possess style and power, are found in the fall prizes!