Husband Juan Goytisolo

Queer Places:
Cimetière du Montparnasse Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France

Monique Lange (September 11, 1926 - October 7, 1996) was a French novelist, screenwriter and editor. Approximately six months after seeing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams in 1955, which would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama in the same year in which William Faulkner won for A Fable, Faulkner and Williams met at a party hosted by Jean Stein. Williams attended with “a young friend of his from Italy”. Monique Lange, who was present at the party, told plainly that “Tennessee Williams and his Italian boyfriend were there.” Later, when Lange decided to leave the party, “she asked Faulkner if he minded if she went with the others to another party”. The “others” were Williams and his boyfriend. Faulkner apparently “laughed” at her for asking his permission to leave and dismissed her, saying, “Go with your queers”.

Monique Lange was born on September 11, 1926 in Paris, in a Jewish family including Henri Bergson and Emmanuel Berl. She spent her childhood in Indochina. In 1960, she was a signatory of the Manifesto of the 121, "Declaration on the right to insubordination in the Algerian war", which advocated military disobedience and the country's independence. In 1971, she also signed the manifesto of the 343, a call for the decriminalization and legalization of voluntary termination of pregnancy. Published in the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, it is, according to the title published on the front page of the magazine, "the list of 343 French women who have the courage to sign the manifesto "I was aborted". She is the author of several novels including Les Poisson-chatsin 1959, Les Platanesin 1960 and Les Cabines de bainin 1962, which won an award. She also published a biography of Édith Piaf in 1988 and an essay on Jean Cocteau (Cocteau: Prince without Kingdom) in 1989. She works at the journal des Temps modernes and is an editor at Gallimard. In cinema, she has collaborated in the writing of screenplays for several films including Vanina Vanini by Roberto Rossellini, The Prisoner by Henri-Georges Clouzot and The Trout by Joseph Losey. She also worked at La revue du cinéma.

She married Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo with whom she collaborates, and had one daughter, writer Carole Achache, who dedicates a vibrant portrait to her, Daughter of in 2011. Monique Lange died at the age of seventy, on October 7, 1996, of a heart attackat her home in Paris.


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