Emmanuel Carrère

Carrère was born in Paris to the Sovietologist Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, and worked for years as a journalist, screenwriter, and biographer (including a life of Philip K. Dick) before the 1993 case of Jean-Claude Romand, a respectable doctor unmasked as a decades-long fraud who murdered his wife, children, and parents rather than admit the lie, fixed itself as his subject.

The Adversary (2000) took Carrère nearly six years to write, corresponding with Romand from prison while wrestling openly, inside the book itself, with his own morbid attraction to the case: a 'nonfiction novel' that made his method explicit, real events narrated with a novelist's shaping hand and a memoirist's confessing conscience.

He went on to apply the same first-person, boundary-blurring method to a French cult murder, an ancient inquiry into Christianity's origins, and a memoir of a stroke-altered friend, becoming one of the defining voices (alongside Ernaux and Knausgaard) of the era's autofictional turn.