Esther Teillard Interview | Alexandre Gilbert #347

Esther Teillard is a French writer and literary journalist from Marseille who studied at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy and contributed to Artpress and France Culture. She published in 2025, Carnes (Pauvert editions, Prix Sade du premier roman, Prix de La Ponche) and in 2026, Fuck Circus, (Grasset).

Carnes — Pauvert, January 15, 2025

Esther Teillard’s debut novel follows a 17-year-old girl who leaves her native Marseille after being accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts de Cergy, in the Paris region. She enters a new, more female-dominated and ostensibly progressive environment, where the language of inclusivity has replaced the overt misogyny she knew in Marseille.

Yet beneath this new social order, violence and desire persist in different forms. Through a provocative gallery of characters—including young women, sex workers, students, and artists—Carnes examines the contradictions of bourgeois feminism and the ways patriarchal violence survives beneath supposedly virtuous social attitudes.

Teillard has described the novel as the story of a young woman’s moral and sexual awakening: a coming-of-age novel concerned with desire, sexuality, violence, and the construction of identity.

Fuck Circus — Grasset, August 26, 2026

Teillard’s second novel takes the opposite trajectory. One summer evening, a young woman is left by her lover, Gabriel. Reeling from the breakup, she wanders alone through the city of her childhood before entering a bar called Le Mythe, a nocturnal world populated by a film producer, a reality-TV star, a politician, a descendant of Chateaubriand, and other damaged and obsessive figures.

As alcohol, desire, shame, obsession, and violence take over the night, the gathering gradually descends into a hostage situation. Rather than depicting a young woman discovering and consolidating her identity, Fuck Circus traces its progressive dissolution. Teillard describes it as an inverted coming-of-age novel: the narrator does not develop but regresses into the night, gradually losing her bearings and her certainties.

At its deepest level, the novel is about de-subjectivization—the loss of the self. Shame is its central emotional force, while the characters embody a generation portrayed as emotionally disembodied, frozen, and unable to reconcile contradictory desires.

In short: Carnes is a novel of awakening and the formation of the self; Fuck Circus is its dark inversion, a novel of desire, disintegration, and the loss of self.

Fuck Circus could almost be read as a kind of inverted bildungsroman, in which the heroine does not grow or progress, but regresses into the night. Is that how you conceived the structure of the book?

Esther Teillard: Yes. My first novel was about the moral and sexual awakening of a young woman. This one is constructed in reverse: my narrator sinks into the night, gradually losing her bearings and her certainties. Ultimately, it is a novel about de-subjectivization: the loss of the self.

Your characters seem to be marked by a misery of desire reminiscent of Houellebecq, later taken up by Stiegler—a desire that no longer knows where to settle. Is this an intellectual lineage you consciously embrace?

Esther Teillard: My characters are colder than Houellebecq’s protagonists. However bleak they may be, his characters are still searching for love, faith, and redemption. My narrator and her companion, Gabriel, are young people of their time: disembodied, frozen, trapped in a kind of compassionate wandering.

Does the film producer who takes the clients hostage embody a failed father figure, whose failure would contaminate the entire evening?

Esther Teillard: Before embodying the figure of the failed father, he primarily illustrates the damage that self-shame can inflict on a person. This character descends into violence and becomes increasingly radicalized over the course of the novel, precisely because he cannot reconcile the contradictory desires that torment him. I have a tenderness for him; he is a magnificent tramp.

In your writing, there are references to shame rather than guilt, particularly in the literature surrounding disappointing characters to whom you become attached. Why choose this particular affect?

Esther Teillard: Shame is a dizzying literary material: it is the only feeling impervious to forgetting, deeply rooted in our memories and in our skin. I began writing this novel with this sentence in mind, spoken by Elder Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov: “Do not be ashamed of yourself, for all evil comes from that.” This sentence is the key to the novel.

(Editor’s note: In The Brothers Karamazov, Elder Zosima is a respected Orthodox monk and spiritual guide known for his wisdom, compassion, and moral insight. The term “starets” refers to an elder—an experienced spiritual figure whom others seek out for guidance.)

Le Mythe, with its hidden corners and shady floors, almost evokes the omnipresence of cockroaches in Dostoevsky—the moral vermin crawling beneath respectability. Is this an image that stays with you?

Esther Teillard: I wrote my thesis on the omnipresence of cockroaches in Dostoevsky’s work: a subject that interests almost no one and that obsessed me for two years. The insect is the enemy within us: the pest. I like Musil’s image, in which he compares modern man to an insect stuck on flypaper. Each of my characters is trapped in a viscous social and moral life.

(Editor’s note: Robert Musil (1880–1942) was an Austrian writer, essayist, and intellectual whose work stands at the intersection of modernist literature, philosophy, psychology, and social criticism. He studied engineering and later philosophy, psychology, and mathematics, eventually receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Berlin. This unusual combination of scientific training and philosophical thought deeply influenced his writing. Musil was fascinated by the tension between rationality and emotion, between the systems through which modern society attempts to organize human life and the irrational desires and impulses that continually escape them.

His literary career began with The Confusions of Young Törless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß), published in 1906, a novel that already explored psychological instability, power, sexuality, and the disturbing gap between social conventions and private impulses. His major work, however, was The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften), an enormous, unfinished novel published in parts from 1930 onward. Set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the novel portrays a society suffering from a profound crisis of values. Its characters are highly educated and sophisticated, yet they appear increasingly incapable of deciding what they believe in or how they should live.)

You live in Montmartre. How would you describe the current atmosphere of the neighborhood, and what elements of it seep into your literature?

Esther Teillard: It is a place that has lost some of its soul, overrun by tourism and the Americanization of the world. There are still pockets of resistance that I visit every day, but I will not name them…

Esther Teillard, Fuck Circus, Grasset, 224 pages, 19 euros, sortie le 26/08/2026.