Writing, // March 3, 2017
Emmanuel Carrère
Late last October, as American electoral pandemonium was approaching its climax, I was in a living room in Paris where the 59-year-old French writer and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère was talking about shame. “To write disagreeable things about the self, dishonorable things,” Carrère told me, reclining like an analysand on a black leather couch, “this doesn’t present me with any problems. I have very little shame. There are many things I’ve done or thought that I consider bad, but I don’t feel shame over them because I think that everyone feels they’ve done bad things. I think it does a reader good to see: ‘Oh, he’s the same way. Him too.’
