(This is a two volume biography but I'm going to review them together.)

Colette was one of my heroines when I was in my 20s. I read The Vagabond, her autobiographical novel of music hall life, and identified with it, which was mostly wishful thinking. I even started an embroidery of a quote from it: "Two habits have taught me to hold back my tears: that of concealing my thoughts, and of darkening my lashes with mascara." Anybody who knows me well will laugh and laugh at the idea of me concealing my thoughts.

This biography of Colette claims that it's the first to reexamine her life and clear up the facts behind the image she created of herself.

It's a sea of details. In May she rented an apartment at 15 Rue Fronchy Something (now Rue de Charles De Gaulle) for 6,000 francs, but she only stayed there for three months. Then she went to Deauville for two weeks, and then returned to Paris for a week. After that she left for Tangier to stay with the Marquis de Something for six weeks. Etc., etc., etc.

However, the authors don't step back to analyze much of this. Here and there, they make a statement or two, but mainly it's a ton of facts. As new people enter, they get brief biographies, which are interesting, but they feel like snapshots, not part of the whole.

Colette and her brothers were raised by their mother along the principles of François Fourier, a 19th century French utopian socialist and philosopher who believed society would be improved with cooperation and sexual freedom. He advocated what we'd call polyamory. The siblings had few rules and heard their mother disparage religion and marriage. Her parents had affairs (but they don't say when Colette became aware of that and how she felt about it.) There's brief discussion of her school days, which may or may not be the basis for Claudine at School, her first novel. It's not made clear if the lesbian affairs depicted there really happened or if she invented them, which is the kind of thing I expect a biography to address..

She marries a Parisian critic, a friend of her brother, and moves to Paris, where she enters a sophisticated milieu of artists, actors, and writers, many of them homosexual or unconventional in different ways. She makes friends and has flirtations, and find out her husband has a mistress. She falls in love with a lesbian socialite, and has an affair with her, the first of many affairs with women.

Okay, I'm naive, but since it hadn't been made clear if the Claudine stuff was autobiographical, I think this needed discussion. Was it a big deal for her to break her marriage vows? Is this what her Fourierist upbringing prepared her for? How did she see herself - gay, bi, a married woman who just happens to have affairs with women? Transgressive? Lesbian until graduation? They finally talk about this halfway through the second volume which seems a little late in the day. (And yes, she apparently didn't have any desire to have a conventional marriage, then or later.)

So she created an image of herself as a simple country girl who came to the big city, and was locked up by her mean old husband and forced to write the "Claudine" books, for which he took credit. They show pretty convincingly that this wasn't the way it happened, so the book succeeds on that level.

She's fascinating, but after reading this biography I'm not even sure I like her. She comes off as an egotistical monster who did as she pleased even when it hurt people. I'll say this for her, she was true to herself. ( )