Lili Owen Rowlands

When​ I trained as a volunteer for a rape crisis helpline in 2017, I was taught to allow three rings before picking up. This gives the caller time to ready themselves: answer more quickly and they might feel startled; leave it too long and the gap can feel like abandonment. There are no rules about what constitutes a crisis. Calls can be about an assault that took place days earlier or an...

In​ 1984 Guillaume Dustan drafted a personal ad: ‘In brief: young man, eighteen, hypokhâgne, Lycée Henri-IV, short brown hair, 1.7 metres, part preppy, part 1950s greaser, not very sporty – sensual – funny, neither a party animal nor a bookworm. Now let’s see if the feeling is mutual …’ Written when he still went by the name William...

When​ Vanessa Springora first met the French writer Gabriel Matzneff at a dinner party in 1986, she liked the sound of his name. She was only there because her mother, who worked in publishing, couldn’t afford a babysitter. Springora, who was thirteen, spent much of the evening reading Eugénie Grandet and feeling Matzneff’s gaze on her cheek like a warm hand, though his smile reminded her of a ‘large golden wildcat’.

Vernon Subutex​ is nearly fifty, ‘thin as a rake’ and good-looking if you can get past his furred, yellow teeth. His hair is long and completely white, but mostly still there. It’s Paris, 2014. When we meet him in the first volume of Virginie Despentes’s trilogy, Vernon is about to be kicked out of his apartment after losing his job running a record shop called...

Françoise​ Gilot wasn’t impressed when she first saw Guernica, aged 15, at the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris. She appreciated the painting as a political act, but ‘was not so crazy, aesthetically or technically, about Picasso’. Six years later, she spotted him across the tables of Le Catalan, a restaurant on the Left Bank, and was equally underwhelmed. Surrounded...