True Stories

"True Stories" is Sophie Calle's closest approach to autobiography, a sequence of short texts and photographs first published in French in 1994 and expanded across later editions.

Each tale runs no more than a page and is paired with a single image, moving between lighthearted, humorous, serious, dramatic, and cruel. The book is arranged in three parts: reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard, or "the breasts"; "The Husband," recollections from Calle's first marriage; and a third section of further autobiographical fragments touching childhood, marriage, sex, and death. Calle is author, narrator, and protagonist throughout, and Actes Sud has kept adding new stories with each new edition. This copy is a small, pocket-sized hardcover.

Calle, a French conceptual artist born in 1953, more often builds her work from other people's lives and testimony; "True Stories" is the rare instance where the life on the page is her own.