Françoise Héritier is honorary professor at the Collège de France and at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. She has written important, path-breaking books, including the hugely successful Le Sel de la vie [The Salt of Life].
This new work by Françoise Héritier continues Le Sel de la vie, published in 2012, which sold 180,000 copies.

Making use of personal writing, the author captures and retranscribes what is common to us all: the ability to remember positive things, suspended moments, little pleasures that create a taste for life.

“…to sit on the dry stones of a little wall alongside a lizard; to temporarily occupy an office that is not your own and imagine the work of the real occupant; to applaud a play, an opera, or a speaker so loudly and strongly that your hands ache; to try on new shoes; to have had a dolls’ house, a play tea service; to remember the sensual pleasure of cutting out the pages of a book with a paper cutter …”

This intimate, sensitive and generous experience of writing invites each of us to rediscover and collect these individual, but commonly shared, sensations, which make us perceive the wealth of a life when they emerge from our memories. A book that helps the reader feel alive.