The self-proclaimed autobiographical reliability of Huston’s non-fictional essays is an implicit warning to the reader against any attempt to impose an autobiographical reading on her fictional works. Huston’s non-fictional writing complements and provides a commentary on her fictional works and how they are to be read. Generically and stylistically hybrid, Huston’s writing project is entirely tied up with her displacement, and her texts themselves confound boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, between fictional ‘subjectivity’ and non-fictional ‘objectivity’. Ever committed to a feminist agenda, Huston has demonstrated a consistent engagement with the place of women in Western culture and society, the reconciliation of women’s reproductive capacity with creative endeavour, and the ‘mind-body problem’ (Note 4). As her writing has evolved, Huston has persistently revisited and revised the relations between the different aspects of her identity: as French, as Canadian, as a woman writer, and as an exile. Born of her own intercultural experience, her novels have traced a steady expansion in their settings and concerns to the translational and translingual in works that span the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries. Huston has discursively investigated the processes of her insertion into the adopted culture, reflecting on how her cultural and linguistic identity is manifested in her writing, and how this impacts on her position within the French literary canon. Inspired by her own migration from North America to France, Huston has consistently explored the concerns associated with the experience of uprooting oneself from one’s native country and constructing a new life in an adopted country and language in both her fictional and non-fictional texts. Yet she celebrates, at the same time, her status as linguistic outsider which offers her a critical distance and freedom of expression that English, as her mother tongue, does not. Huston has frequently described the reaction of native speakers of French to her not-quite-native French as constituting a mechanism of exclusion which reinforces her ‘non-belonging’ to the linguistic community of French. She bears the remarkable trait of translating her own works from French into English, and occasionally from English into French. Like many writers before her who arrived from elsewhere and settled in Paris, Huston adopted the French language as her primary language of literary expression and, only in 1993, did she begin to write in English as well (Note 3), at times switching between the two during the writing process. More recently she has been increasingly collaborating with artists and photographers to create works which combine text and image. A prolific writer, Huston has published in a range of genres including novels, essays, plays, correspondence, short prose texts and children’s books as well as translations (of her own and others' works). Huston has since remained in France, where she has now spent the greater part of her life. Arriving in Paris in 1973, after ‘une enfance instable, marquée par des déménagements fréquents’ (Note 1), she completed a Master’s degree at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales under the supervision of Roland Barthes, and soon entered into Parisian feminist, literary, and cultural circles, publishing her first work in 1979 (Note 2).
After having spent her childhood in Alberta and her adolescence in Boston, Huston went to Paris at the age of 20 with some knowledge of French as part of an undergraduate degree programme at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Nancy Huston was born in Calgary in anglophone Canada in 1953.
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