Quelques mois dans ma vie (A Few Months in My Life), published in French in 2023, is a short autobiographical account of six months, October 2022 to March 2023, in which Michel Houellebecq was caught up in two overlapping public scandals. He presents it as an attempt to set the record straight. The first scandal came from a long published conversation with the philosopher Michel Onfray, in which Houellebecq made sweeping remarks about French Muslims that led to a legal complaint from the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris. In the book he concedes he expressed himself badly and offers corrections, while defending his broader worries about French society. The second, which takes up most of the text, concerns a sexually explicit film he agreed to make with a Dutch art collective. Houellebecq describes how he came to regret it, his conviction that he had been manipulated and exploited, and his legal effort to stop its release.
The book is not a novel, and its tone swings between self-mockery, grievance, bitterness and odd candor about sex, fame, marriage and vulnerability. It has not been translated into English. Readers who know Houellebecq mainly as the provocative author of Submission and Atomization will find a strange companion piece: the writer facing the kind of humiliating public exposure his fiction so often stages. Critics in France were largely unimpressed by it as literature. Others have read it as a revealing document of how a celebrity author handles the media cycles of the internet era, and of the gap between a writer's persona and the person behind it.