Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

by Judith Thurman

A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation.

Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy--a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary of Willy's sexual domination, Colette pursued an extremely public lesbian love affair with a niece of Napoleon's. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter who bored her, at forty-seven she seduced her teenage stepson, and in her seventies she flirted with the Nazi occupiers of Paris, even though her beloved third husband, a Jew, had been arrested by the Gestapo. And all the while, this incomparable woman poured forth a torrent of masterpieces, including Gigi, Sido, Cheri, and Break of Day.

Judith Thurman, author of the National Book Award-winning biography of Isak Dinesen, portrays Colette as a thoroughly modern woman: frank in her desires, fierce in her passions, forever reinventing herself. Rich with delicious gossip, and intimate revelations, shimmering with grace and intelligence, Secrets of the Flesh is one of the great biographies of our time.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, France, Biography Memoir, Classics, Memoir

592 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 1999

About the author

Judith Thurman began contributing to The New Yorker in 1987, and became a staff writer in 2000. She writes about fashion, books, and culture. Her subjects have included André Malraux, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Thurman is the author of “Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller,” which won the 1983 National Book Award for Non-Fiction, and “Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette,” (1999), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Biography, and the Salon Book Award for biography. The Dinesen biography served as the basis for Sydney Pollack’s movie “Out of Africa.” A collection of her New Yorker essays, “Cleopatra’s Nose,” was published in 2007.

Thurman lives in New York.

Source: www.newyorker.com/magazine/contributo...‎

Reviews

[Iain · Rating 4 out of 5]

'A Life of Colette,' could so easily have been retitled, 'The Life in Colette.'
She certainly crammed a lot into her 81 years on this planet. This lady took every advantage that came her way and turned it into something memorable, whether positive or not so positive. I've always admired her, but never really understood how influential she was and still is until I read this beautifully written biography. Miss Thurman deserves the accolades she's garnered for this book, and I shall add to them.

[AMEERA · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

The mere possession of an "interesting" personality is no longer the ticket of admission to a terminally sated and bored society which has developed, as Arendt puts it, "a morbid lust for the exotic, abnormal and different, as such."

I am familiar with two of the authors of the blurbs on the back of this book. One of them I view with the sardonic eye of "Oh One much praised by others, I've a feeling I'll much enjoy tearing you apart." The other is a genius in my mind, mayhaps by way of my lack of experience with reading biographies, but nonetheless. The two sum up well my thoughts on this particular portrait: Colette, one who made great gains for women in the sphere of French life and literature, collaborated with Nazis for the benefit of herself and her Jewish husband, and cultivated a moral passivity on the grounds of love, money, and the survival of her own complex self. Complicated, hypocritical, we would've defenestrated each other posthaste had we ever met, but her life made for some damn good reading.

On every storm-tossed vessel filled with retching bodies, there is usually one passenger, freakishly sound, who strolls the pitching deck on steady feet while insolently eating a ham sandwich. Colette was that sort of freak at the fin de siècle.

If Lolita had been carted and quartered away in a barely more legalized matter in fin de siècle France, outlived one, two, two and a half husbands, exacted a semi-revenge of submission from the other side of the generation, intermediated with lesbianism of no slighted (bi/pan)sexual nature, and wrote, acted, stripteased, mimed, make-upped, reported, directed, and lived to the ripe old age of eighty-one, you wouldn't get a measure of Colette, but a rather bland reference of cobbled together facts that aspires to sensationalize. Luckily, you have this biography, so you need not pay much attention to me. I will admit, however, that a major reason for my enjoyment is how the biographer played with the liminal space of the translation of this noncontemporaenous life. Those who heed not history are doomed to repeat it, and it was with especial enjoyment that I read Thurman recalling, remarking, reveling, relishing, ridiculing and rebuking, the latter of these last two falling rightfully every so often on Colette but never the former. Colette was this biographer's chosen charge, and she does not conflate doing her justice with defending her every move and measure. Here, punching up is the constant motto.

The spirit of the Second Empire was embodied in a line from Zola's workings notes for Nana, which defines the novel's "philosophical subject as follows: a whole society hurling itself at the cunt." Zola makes Nana's "cunt" the symbol of all that was degenerate in the body politic: new money, vulgar consumption, and foreign influences; an aristocracy prepared to abandon honor, religion, and prudence, indeed to commit suicide for its carnal pleasures; a proletariat debased by poverty, alcohol, and bad genes, and eager to pollute its oppressors; a parasitic Fourth Estate–the press–profiting from the debauchery of Parisian high life and goading its bacchants toward their ruin.

The word 'misogyny' has thirteen indexed page references, including the incidents in the end notes. If the overt focus of such in a biography of a woman written by a woman disturbs you unduly, first of all, what the actual fuck are you doing in my corner of the Internet? Second of all, buh-bye. For those who are left, it amuses me in the death-dealing logic sense of the word that this country and period so beloved by academia and Francophiles was such a pig. Sure, the Nazis showed up near the end of Colette's time of it, but did you see the race/gender/Jewish/etc cacophony that the cultural hobnobs were swimming in previously? True, having so many names transition from fame to that banal variety of human infamy is always a downer, but one must eventually grow up. Just think about it like this: which authors in your favored repertoire had their existence censured by their fellows? Whether they're worth the price of maintaining those gleeful butchers of cohorts on their gilded pedestals is a matter left to you. Not all can outlive their thieves and murderers like Colette; leastwise, the ones that weren't her own self.

And she acknowledges that the greatest obstacle to her escape from the torture of the hair shirt–"a hundred times more dangerous than the greedy beast [of lust] is the abandoned child who trembles inside of me, weak, nervous, ready to stretch out her arms and beg: 'Don't leave me alone!'"

Want writing? Here you go. Want WWI? Have at it. Want WWII? Knock yourself out. Want the second female member of the Prix Goncourt judging panel, originally stipulated to never welcome women, Jewish people, poets, and members of the Académie française? Right here. Want the first French Republic state funeral ever given to a woman? Yep. Want the live fast die young excursions of sex, gender roles, and and rags to riches writing of a one of a century persona? Indeed. Not as familiar as I'd like to be with the hoards swirled about Colette's galaxy, but any looking to bump literary elbows with all those European names of old dead folks, here's your scratch.

As the dirt was shoveled into the grave, the rain began, the winds rose, and the stone broke–one of the most violent in a century. She would have enjoyed it.

[Madeline · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an excellent, if slightly unusual biography - Colette herself was highly unusual, of course, and this is one of the few biographies I've read where the subject triumphs. I mean, yes, yes, that's partly my own sympathies speaking up, isn't it: when you mostly read biographies of artists (especially writers and movie stars? riiiight) and politicians (especially Alexander Hamilton and T.E. Lawrence? riiiiight), then an overall sense of failure is going to crop up. But Secrets of the Flesh is the life of a woman who did what she wanted and got away with it. That's not a story we often get to hear - although actually, Colette's life introduces us to several more of that kind of woman, Natalie Barney especially (perhaps also Marguerite Moreno, though I only got a sketchy picture of her life and unlike Barney's it is more difficult to figure out from ... Google).

Thurman's book is incredibly enjoyable, insightful, and beautifully written. It has, though, an unusual and potentially off-putting quality, which is that Thurman is herself a palpable presence. I think Terry Castle's review pointed out that Colette's personality is such that it could easily overwhelm a biographer - which is spot on. And if writing about Colette is going to be a wrestling match anyway, why deny your presence in the ring? It's not that Thurman inserts any odd memoir-ish "my life with Colette" passages, if that's what you're worried about, but she has a definite narrative role, making you very aware of what she is doing, and where she is going. I really liked this part of Secrets of the Flesh, though I realize it might distress people with stricter standards of academic purity than I have got.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often think of this book--like whenever I'm asked if I could have dinner with three people, living or dead. After reading this book, Colette is my ultimate dinner companion. What a life. She straddled centuries, classes, sexes, mores, and managed to become one of the most acclaimed writers of her time. Judith Thurman is an admirable biographer, bringing you in not just to a life, but to what was a very strange social order, the French demimonde. Riveting and rereadable--don't give your copy away, you'll regret it.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Secrets of the Flesh" is a remarkably sordid book written by an author who clearly admires her subject for her depravity. Colette has always been known as a libertine (sleeping at one point with her sixteen year old step son); as opposed to a liberated woman (opposing voting rights for women the emancipation movement).

What makes this work such a great joy is the stunning amount of research put into. Thurman clearly knows the work of all the great authors that Colette frequented (Proust, Anatole France, Jean Cocteau, Andre Gide, etc.) More importantly she also demonstrates an astounding knowledge of the second raters that virtually no Anglo Saxon reader would have heard of and that the overwhelming majority of French readers would also be unfamiliar with (Paul Bourget, Anna de Noailles, Catulle de Mendes, Paul Morand, Drieu la Rochelle, etc.) Finally, she is able to elucidate the third tier of French culture comprised of sleazy theatre and trashy novels in which her her first husband Willy (Henry Gauthier-Villars) was one of the driving forces of the era.

One of the great surprises of Thurman's book then is the nuanced and generally sympathetic picture of Willy who is generally viewed as an utter cad who falsely claimed the authorship of Colette's superb series of Claudine novels. In fact Willy was essentially a brand of pulp fiction. Henry Gauthier-Villars used a number of other ghost writers. Colette was perfectly aware that she was just one of many who wrote as "Willy".

I am giving Thurman the five-star rating despite my dislike of her extensive psychological analysis. A psychological assessment can only be performed by a qualified psychologist who must followed the prescribed methodology of the profession. This fact is of course routine ignored by literary critics and biographers. Fortunately, Thurman's loopy comments on the psychology of Colette do not significantly undermine her outstanding work. Nonetheless, her comments on the imagined pathologies of Colette irritated me tremendously.

[Ruby Hollyberry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just reread this and greatly enjoy it. It has been done very thoroughly and does not give any impression that anything could have been sloughed over or left out. I am not at all disappointed... and yet I can't give it five stars because the author put far too much of herself into it - a morally opinionated and properly feminist modern woman with little in common with Colette. I think the best biographies give you almost no real sense of who the author is and what their own outlook on life might be. It's great that Thurman has reasoned and well-researched opinions on possible gray areas of Colette Studies, but I'm only interested in Colette, not her. Her personal opinions and biases are not wanted, and they are scattered throughout the book. So I'm not 100% happy with it, but I am thrilled that she wrote it. It was time for a new and really complete biography of such an amazing person.

[Kit · Rating 1 out of 5]

It takes real talent to make Colette boring. Too much time is spent on people who are NOT Colette (I don't need to know about Willy's grandmother's cousin's wife's little sister's best friend) and even the parts that are about her, they're so verbose and dense that it obscures more than it reveals. I like wordy books, but not if they're wordy just to show off the author's stupendous vocabulary.

Also, and I don't know if I'd consider this truly a problem, but it's very much a Nineties book, with all the inherent homophobia/transphobia, and some, shall we say, QUESTIONABLE psychoanalysis.

[Asya · Rating 3 out of 5]

WHEN WILL THIS BOOK END??? I've yet to master the art of skimming, and this book needs this method, otherwise it's an endless barrage of poorly-connected details with an occasional "daring" interpretation that reads like a copy/paste from Freud or Wittig. Even exhaustive biographies need to tell a story, omitting some details in favor of a whole. That's my opinion at least (I see the other point too - life is full of disconnected minutiae, so is a bio, etc etc). So this baggy monster is informative, rich, true to Colette but oh so painful to slog through. (contemplating not finishing it in favor of the pile of H. James on my table)

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bottom Line First
Secrets of the Flesh; A life of Colette is over long. The scholarship is excellent. Ms Thurman is at her best giving her analysis of Madam Colette's extensive library, but the biographer cannot tell the difference from significant, or illustrative events and tittle-tattle. Overall this is a good book. There is too much book and not enough of it is important.

Early in Secrets of the Flesh Author Judith Thurman tells us that her subject, Colette may have invented the modern teenager. Her subject is self-indulgent, moody, jealous and given to causing jealousy. These details may be sufficient to validate the case, but Ms Thurman does not define what she means by so categorizing Colette and which of these characteristics prove the characterization.

This same woman was a prodigious writer, novelist, autobiographer, reporter, reviewer, and playwright. In short there were very few applications of the written word that carry no examples of Colette as a superior performer. When not writing, and she was almost always writing, she became an actress. Not merely a woman of the stage but a performer at the leading edges of the field, even where the roles required nudity. Meantime she had at least three husbands (one would become head of the French government and a major player in world politics) and scandalous for her affairs with men, including much younger men and women. There would be few secrets of the flesh unknown to Colette, but one suspects many secrets of the heart that eluded her.

As much as the book title emphasizes matters of the flesh an as much as Colette's life and writing revolved around matters sexual. Ms. Thurman can be rather prissy. Leaving it to your imagination may be the academically correct alternative, and indeed Colette herself was never overtly pornographic but the readers should not have to read between the lines about who is having affairs with who. Colette could be very wounded by the many infidelities of her various husbands and lovers, except that she frequently was involved in infidelities of her own. Including infidelities with the mistresses/lovers of her husbands and lovers. All rather complex and occasionally calling for the kind of specifics that Ms Thurmond avoids.

The breath of Colette's authorship is as vast as her romantic entanglements. This biography is at its best when time is taken to consider these writings. Ms Thurman shares with us insights and opinions that clarify the context of the novelist and the shades of meaning as one moves from French to, in my case English. I am most grateful for those parts of this Bio that help me relate the author to her words.

I am least grateful for the nearly endless recounting of the many parties, homes and other social engagements of this important and well connected woman. There are too many pages given over to these visitations and listing attendees. Madam Colette lived a complex and productive life. She is worthy of 500 pages. More of the pages could have been devoted to the product of the author and less on how and with whom she dined.

[Petra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fulfills Reading Women challenge prompt 15. Biography

Dense and detailed account on Colette, one of the most intriguing writers of 20th century. I loved how Thurman doesn't either idolize or judge Colette; she, indeed, was a horrible mother and antisemitic while she was an incredibly talented, hardworking and passionate writer. Thurman manages to portray her as humanbeing, with faults' and yearning for love.

[Marta · Rating 5 out of 5]

Colette was absolutely fascinating, unique, controversial, full of contradictions; she lived her life just as she wrote - always about love, just the way she pleased.

I have only read three of her novellas - Gigi, Chéri and The Last of Chéri - and found it so different and mesmerizing that I ended up spending hours Googling her and gazing at her photos. Look them up: her photos are beguiling - even the ones from when she was very young are striking, and the theatrical photos are a real treat - some are semi-nude, which scandalized all Paris. That’s when I decided I had to read her biography - she was the first modern woman, flouting conventions, making her own way, defying every rule of the order of the sexes, exploring “deviants” - the community of gays and lesbians, of the demimondes, the theater, all manners of domination and submission.

Colette was married three times, twice to dominating husbands who mistreated her and cheated on her; she only found true love and the meaning of constancy with her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, who was 17 years younger and pursued the still alluring Colette in her fifties. Colette had long-term affairs with both men and women, including her stepson, who was 30 years younger - partially as a revenge on her husband.

Her mother was a strong, fascinating character, “the real Madame Bovary” as Thurman calls her, dominating Colette but also giving her lots of care, advice and a happy childhood. Colette struggled with her legacy and wrote a book about her - ironically she did a lot worse with her own daughter, whom she let be raised in the country, and when she returned, she treated her harshly, often criticized her and was always unhappy with her. Needless to say Bel-Gazou grew up resentful and rebellious. These were the years that I found hardest to swallow and I had to take a few days off from listening to the book.

Colette was not a good or likeable woman, yet she attracted writers and intellectuals her whole life - not to mention lovers. She flouted conventions and advocated for free love - but rejected feminism and suffragettes. She had lesbian affairs but disapproved of her own daughter’s lesbianism. She loved life and vitality and could not stand sickness, weakness or ugliness. Yet she had the uncanniest talent to observe, pay attention to the tiniest details, to draw human characters, their desires, disillusions.

Colette had produced a tremendous amount of writing in about 55 years. Much of it are novellas and full length novels, but she was also a journalist and wrote everything from women’s advice columns through theater reviews to war reporting in World War I. She became famous by writing the Claudine novels at the instigation of her first husband, who was a writer publishing under the name Willie. Willie published the Claudines under his name, and Colette’s demand to acknowledgment as the author and to the royalties became the center of their bitter divorce battle.

Colette’s fiction is largely autobiographical - she draws her characters from life, even as she often invents the stories. They are mostly about love or seeking personal fulfillment or pleasure. She wrote about her mother, and in The Vagabonde, about her theater years, drawing a detailed portrait of the poverty and travails of performers. Colette is never political, her interests are dysfunctional love affairs, disillusioned couples, deviants, domination and submission, and occasionally, real love. By the end of her life, she became the most acclaimed writer in France. She was nominated for a Nobel prize (but did not get it). When she died, she was awarded a French state funeral - the first ever for a woman.

Judith Thurman does a good job of connecting her life to her work, and weaving a spell-binding story. I did not care for some of the Freudian analysis of her relationship with her mother, but thankfully it was short. We do not feel close to Colette - but I think that’s impossible with such a complex character with so full of contradictions who often acted selfishly, without concern for others. Yet she emerges as someone utterly fascinating, a down-to-earth literary genius who insisted she never wanted to be a writer.

I highly recommend this book. So does J.K. Rowling, btw. (I did not know this was one of her favorite books until after I finished it. But hey, she has good taste.)

[Mo · Rating 4 out of 5]

ETA: By way of background, Colette was my first literary crush, so the less savory aspects of who she was hit me hard when I first heard of them. And Colette's romanticizing of relationships between middle-aged adults and people in, or barely out of, their teens reads as a lot creepier at 57 than it did at 14. I also suspect I'd be, at a minimum, uncomfortable with the Claudine stories if I reread them now, but as a teenager they gave me breathing room I couldn't give myself. Long before I came out to myself, I loved that a woman decades older than my grandmother had written these gorgeous, meticulously detailed stories about queer girls and women.

I have a great deal of admiration for this complex, impressively well-researched biography. There's a breadth to it that gives a thoughtful portrayal of the world Colette lived in, her music hall career, friendships, loves, family, queerness, sensuality, relationship to her own body, pragmatism, and her vocation. I also learned a lot about Provence and Paris between the late 1800s and the mid-1900s, and I was happily surprised to learn about Colette's blissful fat acceptance nearly a century before the phrase was in use. But in many ways, Colette was a dick, and I appreciate how much Judith Thurman let Colette's words and documented actions stand on their own without obvious censure or adulation. In particular, her portrayal of Colette's “good people on both sides” collaboration with fascists, and unwillingness to see beyond the husband and friends directly harmed by Hitler and Mussolini's rise to power, seems prescient in light of today's false equivalencies and hand-wringing over why we can't all just get along. (In case I'm being unclear, there is never a wrong time to punch nazis.) And I find it interesting that Colette demanded bodily autonomy, sexual freedom, and the right to work outside the home but viewed feminism with disgust. I don't think I'm doing anything like justice to Secrets of the Flesh. It's been a few days since I finished it and, though I'm very much enjoying what I'm reading now, I keep thinking about this biography.

[Frank McAdam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a well written biography that is also well balanced in its presentation. Though Thurman obviously has great affection for her subject, she does more then present a one-dimensional portrait of a woman who was both a famous author and a feminist pioneer (not that Colette herself would have subscribed to such a description). Instead, Thurman does not hesitate to show the many darker sides of Colette's character in all their pettiness and nastiness, and the book is much richer for it.

The biography is also incisive in its analysis of Colette's literary works and presents as background an excellent description of the turbulent periods in French history through which Colette lived. There are also many interesting portraits of the celebrities and literary figures - including Proust and Cocteau - whom Colette befriended or worked with during her multiple careers as author, mime, critic, columnist, actress and screenwriter.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very thorough and well written biography. The first part also provides some, to me, fascinating background and insights into the fin-de-siècle (the 19th that is) decadence in Paris. I was also surprised to learn that she published in extreme right wing and anti semitic journals before and during the war.

Sometimes, knowing the background of a book's creation provides extra enjoyment when reading it. In this case, however, I'm glad I read Colette's books before I learned about the circumstances under which they were created.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I don't normally ready biographies, but this was fascinating, I didn't even mind the extensive detail. Colette lived a wild old life, and is as interesting a character as any in her books. Made me want to reread her novels.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this biography of Colette-an author who I didn't know much about but whose life is utterly fascinating. There is a lot of joy in her after-50's explosion of success and creativity here, too.

[Lorimul · Rating 2 out of 5]

i just couldn't finish it and i always finish books.....just too wordy and indulgent

[Leslie Zemeckis]

Excellent detailed bio of this inspiring author -
Not always likes me but one to be admired

[Saimi Korhonen · Rating 3 out of 5]

"On every storm-tossed vessel filled with retching bodies, there is usually one passenger, freakishly sound, who strolls the pitching deck on steady feet while insolently eating a ham sandwich. Colette was that sort of freak at the fin de siècle."

3,5/5!

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is one of the most famous french female authors. She was a controversial figure in her time - a woman who defied the laws of propriety, had affairs with both men and women, wrote openly about sex, seduction and the inner lives of women, acted and performed on stage (at this point this wasn't considered appropriate), ran a beauty salon (also not considered appropriate for a famous author) and married three men. This book also shines a light on the culture and time period Colette lived in, explores the meaningful people of her life (her mother, husbands, lovers, friends etc.) and offers a look even into the political developments of France in her time.

Colette is a fascinating woman and so I was excited to read this highly praised biography on her and her wild, peculiar life, but unfortunately I was a bit disappointed in certain aspects of the book.

What I did love about this book, was how well-researched it was, how much of Colette's letters and own words - as well as those of her friends and loved ones - were included in the book. This is a biography packed with information, anecdotes and small details of Colette's life. You get a very good sense of this woman, who she was and all the things she accomplished. Her importance to french literary history also becomes apparent - she was, for example, the first woman ever who was granted a state funeral in France. Thurman also didn't shy away from the less appealing sides of Colette, such as her manipulative tendencies, coldness towards her daughter, her hostility towards feminism and women's rights movements, and her casual racism and anti-semitism. Thurman paints a well-rounded picture of a complicated woman, and I appreciated that.

I also liked how Thurman did not write only about Colette - she also wrote about the people who played a big role in her life and explored their lives as well. Sometimes it got a bit too much - I wasn't always able to keep track who was who and how they knew Colette - but overall, I liked it. For example, I enjoyed learning about Colette's mother and her husbands. Willy was portrayed more positively - he wasn't vilified as blatantly as I've sometimes seen him be interpreted.

Now, onto the stuff I didn't like. First of all, this book didn't need to be this long. Some editing would've made it a much more entertaining and pleasant read. And due to the fact that this book was written quite a while ago, there is some unpleasant language used on some marginalised groups, such as queer and trans/non-binary folk. This is unfortunately to be expected in an older work, but I can't pretend it didn't grate me at times.

I also disliked how Thurman analysed Colette, her relationships and her emotions in a very psychological way - for example, she writes on and on about how Colette's relationships with her parents influenced her sexuality, her sexual relationships and the kinds of dynamics she sought out in her personal life. It felt a bit uncomfortable and invasive and too out-there. There was such a heavy emphasis on Thurman's interpretations of Colette's psychological state n the basis of her works and the relationships depicted in those - I see why she made those assumptions, but they still bothered me because they weren't posed as interpretations of fictional works, but as truths and facts. It wouldn't have been as bad if it'd been just a small part of the book, but it was genuinely continuous and she returned to this idea time and time again throughout the whole book.

I don't know if I'd recommend this. It does give you a solid, in-depth look into Colette's life, career, works and influence, and I did enjoy reading it most of the time, but if there are more modern works on her, works where the author would remain more objective and refrain from psychoanalysing her subject every other goddamn page, I'd recommend those more.

[Devorah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish. Something about the writing style made it feel like hard work to read and I gave up despite the interesting subject.

[Barbara Stoner · Rating 5 out of 5]

If most of us in this country knows Colette at all, we know her through Gigi, the 1954 movie starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan, and featuring the now problematic little song, Thank Heaven for Little Girls, performed by the inimitable Maurice Chevalier. I like it anyway. After all, the original Gigi was being groomed to be a courtesan. This was just another day in the life for Colette.

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Ballantine Reader's Circle) by Judith Thurman, is a stunning biography that travels from Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, the site of My Mother's House and Sido , to Paris with her first husband and the Claudines, through her second marriage, to Henri de Jouvenal, Cheri , Pure and the Impure , innumerable affairs, perfomances, friendships, and writing – always writing.
Of The Pure and the Impure, Thurman writes:

"The popular Colette, the daughter of Sido/Ceres, is our guide to the earthly paradise. But in The Pure and the Impure she takes us on a tour of a realm with which she, like Proserpine, is on intimate terms. This erotic underworld has no glamour for her, and she knows the prisoners to be quite ordinary poor devils: phantoms I seem always to be losing and finding again, restless ghosts unrecovered from wounds sustained in the past when they crashed headlong or sidelong against that barrier reef, mysterious and incomprehensible, the human body.

"As these ghosts confide the secrets of their flesh (always the flesh) to Colette, a pattern begins to emerge from their confessions. All of them have lived their lives starved for an essential nutrient and unable to renounce the fantasy of meeting the Provider who will fill the “void” once and for all."

Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was not a feminist and yet she was, in her way, the freest of us all because what she insisted upon most of all was her own freedom. Freedom to love where she would. Freedom to write how she would. Freedom to live as she would. Freedom, above all, to resist political involvement of any kind.

Liane de Pougy, wrote of the set of sexual rebels of whom Colette was one:

"We were passionate rebels against a woman’s lot, voluptuous and cerebral, little apostles, rather poetical, fond of illusions and dreams. We loved long hair, pretty breasts, simper, charm, grace, not boyishness. ‘Why try to resemble our enemies?’.."

Thurman writes that Colette is "too much of a pagan to judge the fallen for their sins, and too conservative to believe that human nature is capable of reform. What she does [in Bella-Vista (Modern Library Minis) …] is to bear witness to poverty, incest, racism and exploitation and - because she is writing as an artist, not a journalist – to mistrust the witness that she bears."

Even though her third husband, Maurice Goudeket, was a Jew, she found ax murderers, parricides, and serial killers “more interesting than the rise of a peculiar little tyrant in Munich who didn’t eat meat and didn’t seem to like fucking anybody, not even men.”

Maurice was Colette’s most beloved husband. She wrote to him "about such ordinary things…dark little things which are like the grains in a mortice which bind the solid volumes...Look at me, abashed to write that I love you. I’m going off to hide my embarrassment in a hot bath." He was several years younger than she, and, while not always faithful, he was always true to her. She was aware of his infidelities and didn’t blame him at all. In her elder years, she was nearly crippled with arthritis. "The day comes when one abandons oneself," she wrote. Thurman tells us that "her dependence on Maurice was one [self-abandonment], and the valiance it took, on her side, to conceal the humiliation was matched only by the gallantry, on his, to conceal the burden."

In 1951, according to Thurman, she attended a documentary about her life and afterwards remarked to a journalist, "What a beautiful life I’ve had. It’s a pity I didn’t notice it sooner."

We should all, for all of our sins and excesses, have so few regrets.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible biography. It's not an easy read. It's long and it's dense, but it's also broken up by frequent section and chapter breaks, so you can read it bit by bit. The book is a bit too large and heavy to easily make it one of my commute reads, but I still tried valiantly. The thin pages were frustratingly ruffled by our thick early Spring winds. The scope of this book is astounding and I guess you could say the same for Colette's life. She was born in the Belle Epoque and lived through both World Wars. Thurman swims easily in a vast array of sources that include period histories, previous biographies of Colette, a massive cache of correspondence and of course the literary output of the great author. The story she tells is not a hagiography. Colette the literary icon was actually kind of a shit. Selfish and emotionally withdrawn to those closest to her, she often lost herself in the writing that she could never seem to abandon. I was surprised to find that this woman so famous for her fiction was actually a prodigious journalist. We also discover he long career on the stage and her important influence of the early film industry. For all of her personal failures, Colette was clearly a genius.

And as much of a virtuoso as she was on the page, she also was a prodigious lover. This habit developed slowly, as she seemed to remain fairly chaste in her first major relationship with the creepy literary imposter Willy. After escaping this manipulative and domineering man, she found herself replaying this relationship again and again, sometimes repeating the submissive role, but often taking the dominant role later in life, including most notoriously seducing her teenaged stepson, Bertrand de Jouvenal. Woody Allen eat your heart out... Thurman also tells the story of Colette's first and only major lesbian relationship with the Marquise Missy de Morny. Here we see Colette learning how to leach off others as well as her first husband did. The tender years of her marriage to her last greta love Maurice Goudeket and the sad story of her slow decline make for a sweet and somewhat solemn final chapter.

But Colette did not just love with abandon. She also wrote with abandon and often shopped and ate abandon. She travelled a lot, often simply to the French countryside which she so adored. Thurman gives a decent amount of space to summarizing and discussing Colette's literary output. I am ready to pick up at least two of the books I read about in the pages. If there's a fault here it's that Thurman often uses Colette's fiction to fill in the blanks of her life. Sometimes her writing was clearly responding to her experiences, but the extent to which her characters' words reflect her own feelings is sometimes overstated, particularly early in the book when Thurman gropes to reconstruct Colette's childhood. Many of the footnotes in this section refer not to biographical material but to the Claudine novels which were notoriously (and somewhat contentiously) edited with and by Willy. Nevertheless, this is a magisterial work and one that would make a great starting point for anyone researching Colette or simply enamored of the great French literary grand dame.

[Meagan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This must have been an exhausting amount of work. I appreciated how honestly Colette was portrayed. She wasn't sanctified and she wasn't thrown into the mud. She was treated with the same honest irony that she treated many things within her lifetime. What a complex, mystifying, and frustratingly contradictory. So many shining gleams of interest and merit mixed in with deeply selfish, complacent, and cruelly indifferent aspects.

[Mike Sweeney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel bad reviewing now because I haven't even finished yet. In my defense, it is really, really dense. (In a good way, though.)

The bad first. You should probably know something of Colette already. At least her basic biography, and some sense of the books she wrote. Because this book drops you in the middle and rains more names than a Russian novel at you. It took a while for me to get my footing.

But it is deep, reaching deep into the emotions and the intangibles that Colette herself wrestled with, and steeped long and dark in the literature and philosophy of the time.

And it is incredibly quotable. Colette had a way with words. So does Judith Thurman. My copy is marked with so much highlighter now if it wasn't a Kindle book, it would be ten pounds heavier. So many, many wonderful words!

[kangeiko · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good lord, this was hard work. Judith Thurman does a good job with showing all the facets of Colette’s life, but I felt that the love she has for her subject came through a bit too strongly for objectivity. And - well. I found myself strangely repulsed by almost everyone we encountered in this biography, from Willy & his infatuation with a teenaged Colette, to Colette’s numerous writer friends (drowning in their various peccadilloes), to Colette herself, seducing her 16 year old step-son. (Bertrand’s mother didn’t like him spending time with Colette - I wonder why!) Fundamentally, there is something in the sexual relationships depicted that struck me as predatory, and I found that the sympathetic way in which these love affairs were portrayed was distasteful to me. Maybe that makes me a prude, I don’t know. Ultimately, though, I felt that it was a biography of grotesquely distasteful people doing morally questionable things, in a time when such things were thought to be the height of wit and sophistication. And... I found it all really hard going. I’d give it 4 stars for the detail and how clearly Thurman knows her stuff, but this was such a difficult book to slog through, I had to deduct a star.

[Michael Beblowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Judith Thurman accomplished a majestic feat, by thoroughly delving into the correspondence, fiction, non-fiction of the scandalous and sensual fin de siecle authoress Colette. She also balanced her own staggering volume with critiques of other published biographies on the subject. Unfortunately the scope of Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette was too overwhelming to be consistently engaging and the style tended to cite works rather randomly, transitioning between Colette's prolific fiction and historical "fact" within the same paragraph. Also that extended family members and peripheral characters jumped in and out adorned with different names, pet names and nom de plume made Thurman's work resemble translated Russian literature. Colette and her mother were truly revolutionary women, produced in an era of decadent ennui and the birth of surrealism in salon culture, trapped in a provincial region that savored the scandals as an opportunity to pronounce hypocritical censure. If nothing else the first one hundred pages of Secrets of the Flesh have inspired me to seek out the work of Colette.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let's just say this up front: I can't possibly give a book about Colette less than three stars unless it's not talking about Colette at all. The story got a little boring in parts, and I don't think it's because of Colette's life; I think it's in the way it was told. Maybe the biographer has been reading too much Colette...because she seemed to be attempting to make the writing a little to florid. And too philosophical, and a little presumptuous. Props to her for doing so much work on piecing together a lifetime of letters and books and photos, though! The photos included in my hard copy version alone make the book priceless to me.
I don't know if Colette was truly as selfish and cold as the author portrays her to be. Maybe she was. But that does kind of bum me out and I hold on to the ignorant belief that I'll find something different in Colette's works that paint a better picture of her...

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, it has taken me years to finish this book, but I think I actually finished it twice. It has traveled to Paris and back in every season, sat on all of my nightstands and been referenced a hundred times. (The reference sections are a writer's dream come true!) I suppose I didn't want it to end... Like, I didn't want to come to the part when she dies. But having "finished" it, I know it will forever be on my nightstand. I have dog-eared and/or highlighted passages on most of the 500 pages.

I would recommend reading this biography slowly, and alongside the writings it discusses, which are all of them, and by "it" I mean "she," the author, Judith Thurman.

Thorough, articulate, fair, and sensational in just the right measures.

Thank you, Ms. Thurman. Thank you...

[Bunny · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a 5 star biography. I rate it a 3 star due to my lack of literary intenseness, knowledge of writers from this century, lack of knowledge regarding French history and being a reader who enjoys a story line that makes you laugh, cry and feel real life.
That being said, I read this 500 page book which also included pictures of Colette, 29 pages of selected bibliography and 61 pages of reference notes. The author, Judith Thurman, did her homework.
It is about a woman who did what she wanted regardless of the mores of society all thru her life. A wild woman, she prevailed to her very end and became a heroine of her time.