Fifty years ago, Serge Doubrovsky published the first self-aware autofiction. With Fils (Galilée, 1977), the writer-professor responded to an article that the autobiography theorist, Philippe Lejeune, had published in 1973 and in which he defined the famous “autobiographical pact”.

In this article and then in a seminal essay of the same title, Philippe Lejeune asked: “Can the hero of a novel declared as such have the same name as the author? Nothing would prevent it from existing, and it is perhaps an internal contradiction from which interesting effects could be drawn.

But in practice, no example of such research comes to mind.” In a personal letter that Serge Doubrovsky addressed to him, he confessed that he had been strongly influenced by his theoretical work, stating that he had wanted “very deeply to fill this ‘box’ that your analysis left empty, and it was a real desire that suddenly linked your critical text and what I was writing.”