Someone Else Is Waiting for Me, Elsewhere - by Christophe Bigot (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A dazzling "true novel" about the final great love affair of Marguerite Yourcenar

In the early 1980s, all eyes are on Marguerite Yourcenar. The celebrated author of Memoirs of Hadrian has become the first woman elected to the Académie française, achieving a level of literary consecration few writers ever attain. Yet behind the public figure lies a woman entering the last chapter of her life: aging, grieving the slow loss of her longtime companion Grace Frick, and increasingly isolated in her home on Mount Desert Island, Maine.

Then she meets Jerry Wilson. An American photographer nearly half a century younger than she is, he is restless, magnetic, impossible to categorize. Their encounter ignites a passionate and deeply transgressive relationship that will transform Yourcenar's final years and reopen buried wounds, desires, and memories stretching back across her life.

Blending meticulous historical research with the emotional intensity of a great love story, Christophe Bigot recreates the private world of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic writers with extraordinary delicacy, intelligence, and dramatic force. Someone Else Is Waiting for Me, Elsewhere is at once an intimate portrait, a meditation on aging and desire, and a sweeping novel about the freedoms and dangers of love.

Review Quotes

Winner of the Prix de la biographie romancée Geneviève Moll

Finalist for the Prix Femina

Finalist for the Prix des Deux Magots

"A jewel of a book."--Le Point

"Passionate and devastating."--Livres Hebdo

"With grace and far from cliché, Christophe Bigot depicts the emotional upheavals of a writer he understands intimately."--Télérama