L’écriture de soi dans L’impossible retour d’Amélie Nothomb

Abstract

This study focuses on self-writing in The Impossible Return, a work by Amélie Nothomb, and examines the narrative strategies through which the writer transforms her personal experience into literary discourse. The aim is to understand how memory, constantly shifting and reconstructive, becomes a writing material and contributes to the construction of identity. The analysis shows that the text constantly oscillates between autobiography and autofiction, blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction. The return to Japan, a central space in the narrative, acts both as a trigger for memories and as a revealer of the gap between recollected memory and lived reality. Through the narrative voice, the presence of figures such as Pep, spatial and temporal fragmentation, and intertextual references, the narrative stages a subjectivity that is constantly reconfigured. Thus, the work illustrates a form of self-writing based on the transformation of lived experience, where telling one’s life is less about faithful restitution than about its reinvention through the resources of fiction.