Duras comes across as a hyperactive, if not always systematic, writer ... Duras writes this 'me,' this 'I,' this assured voice that lends an air of assurance to outspoken and controversial opinions. Her voice comes across as measured yet absolute, generous yet unrelenting. It is this duality in the 'me' voice that makes these essays so endearing and easy to engage with ... These are not easy essays, but they are always a pleasure to read. As I was reading, I was constantly impressed not only with the beauty of each phrase but with the detail and research that must have gone into translating this collection. Baes and Ramadan capture the liberty and madness, the very breath of Duras’s thought: moving seamlessly between ideas, the measured precise inhales and exhales of an opera singer. They make distant events, foreign ideas, and even repulsive thoughts belong to the reader herself. And through the meandering journey of these essays it is always possible to identify with Duras’s 'I' ... Reading Me & Other Writing is a powerful experience ... Duras’s striking lack of humility in these texts and in her opinions is uniquely different from the immodesty one encounters today; hers is earned confidence and a belief that what she says and studies matters.

These pointedly uneven essays, ranging from 350 words to more than seventy pages, are full of silences and contradictions, leaping between politics, memory, literature, fashion, and art. If Balzac’s densely described universe leaves the reader immobilized in place, Duras requires a different form of submission: one that is active, necessitating constant voluntary consent ... As the writer of this review, I feel keenly aware that the act of trying to apply a cohesive reading to her essays is an experiment she would find inherently displeasing...But describing her work feels as impossible as winning a battle against a rising sea. There is nothing to do but to give in to it. But, of course, fragility comes with its own power. It makes its demands upon its handler, or else it willfully shatters beneath you.

Me & Other Writing brings this facet of Duras to light. In doing so, the volume manages to offer an accessible primer to her work in general as well as a careful assessment of what it is like to attempt to render Duras’s prose into English ... she makes her reader attend to the silences and lacunae that puncture the landscape of not only her language but language itself. And for all that, her writing is still beautiful ... the infinite space, mediated by writing, between the legible and the inaccessible, is what Duras at her best offers the reader.

I wonder if our reality had to fracture in order for Duras’s truth not to get lost in translation, that the world had to catch up with Duras’s wisdom that nothing had the substance of everything ... Every essay in Me & Other Writing exists simultaneously as an honest account and as a dystopian portrait, life inextricable from the ineffable pain of distance: between self and nature, self and God, self and self, self and other.

 Translators Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan have compiled a neat collection for Dorothy, a publishing project, intended to be a 'guidebook to the extraordinary breadth of Duras’s nonfiction.' This description is a little ironic. While it is true that she has written in a variety of mediums, even when you only consider the nonfiction, her voice takes priority over the ostensible constraints of any particular form. That is to say, it all sounds exactly like Duras ... The pieces in Me & Other Writing showcase Duras’s thoughts on reading, writing, motherhood, and politics, but the subject of any piece is Duras herself, something the title of this compilation brings to the fore. Essays move forward based on the obscure and often brilliant pattern of Duras’s thoughts, not through a rhetorical rubric ... This is the timbre of Duras’s voice: equal parts liberating and exasperating, tender and self-centered. She radiates a tacit compassion for other people that is embodied in her unwillingness to talk down to them by making anything easier ... A certain kind of personal-meets-political writing has saturated contemporary literature, wherein the author introduces a number of topics and impressions that seem disparate but are woven together over the length of the work so that meaning is suggested rather than announced ... Duras couldn’t be further stylistically from this bad-faith insouciance. She’ll start with one topic and end somewhere radically different, with no effort made to 'tie it all together' ... All the while, she skips between striking statements about herself, about art, about meaning, morality, and love. There are no boundaries.

This wide-ranging collection opens with a provocative, messy essay ... ithout segue Duras is suddenly commenting on the enduring horror of the Holocaust ... The other pieces are generally more focused but with some distracting disregard for balanced form. Duras writes brilliantly about true crime, Yves Saint Laurent, the art of literary translation, her dislike of Sartre and Marxism-Leninism, and the magic of having her portrait painted. And she can stop hearts recalling scenes from her difficult childhood or her grief for her son who died an hour after birth ... in Duras' hands the disparate mix of fact and fiction yields an overall feeling of intense, poetic vulnerability and fervent political ideals ... While there is often a thrilling sense of pushing into the hidden aspects of reality, the many hyperbolic and contradictory 'absurdities,' as Duras calls them, make for a bumpy ride ... A luminous, erudite exploration of self and art marred by too many outlandish turns.