She Wanted to Be Seen as a Writer. The World Saw Her as a Sex Worker | The Walrus
On September 16, 2007, Nelly Arcan appeared on Tout le monde en parle, a popular weekly panel show in Quebec with a viewership of 2 million people. The thirty-four-year-old writer was promoting her third book, Breakneck. Arcan had shot out of left field six years prior, when—in a turn of events every writer dreams about—the major French publisher Editions du Seuil read the manuscript she had mailed across the Atlantic in a brown paper envelope.
Her debut, Whore, published in 2001, is a furious, stream-of-consciousness, autofictional rendering of Arcan’s experiences as an escort. It oscillates between rage and weariness at the repetitive sexual script its narrator has had to perform for clients. When Bertrand Visage received the package postmarked from Quebec, the editor recalls experiencing a great “literary shock”: “It didn’t resemble anything I knew. I didn’t understand everything, but I thought it was beautiful!” He immediately bought a plane ticket to Montreal and flew out that weekend, concluding, after the visit, that Arcan was “the real deal.” Within two weeks, she had a signed contract.
The book was a critical success—selling 75,000 copies and landing on the shortlist for two of France’s top literary prizes. It was also a scandal. Critics immediately began asking to what extent it was really Arcan’s own story. The visceral first-person prose had an undeniable truthiness. Yet it was hard to reconcile the soft-spoken lit student at Université du Québec à Montréal with the ferocious, hypersexualized narrator. One journalist called her “a contradiction on two legs.”
This cognitive dissonance was on full display when Arcan walked onto the set that September day, clad in a black satin evening dress and accompanied by the song, unsubtly chosen by producers, “Quand on se donne (à une femme d’expérience)”—or “When you give yourself (to an experienced woman)”. From the first question, it was clear that the host, Guy A. Lepage, was there to interview the whore rather than the writer. After a reductive overview of her major themes (“the cult of beauty, the fear of aging, plastic surgery, and the problematic desire to please others at all costs”), Lepage launched into his first comment: “You are very preoccupied by your body image because the thing that gives you the most anxiety when you have to promote your books is not interviews, it’s not speaking to people, it’s the photo shoots.”
As Arcan began to answer, the camera crawled its way up her body, from her arms to her breasts, finally framing her face. When she tried to explain how women are tyrannized by an image-obsessed culture that forces them to perform femininity for the consumption of men and women alike, the all-male panel could not hold back its incredulity. “You denounce it but at the same time you uphold it!” exclaimed co-host Dany Turcotte. “I’m sure there are many audience members who are consuming your femininity right now!” Prominent stand-up comedian Martin Matte added: “And some panellists too!” eliciting riotous audience laughter.
The humiliations came hard and fast after that, culminating in an invitation to arm wrestle, the implication being that jacking off countless men must have certain muscular benefits.
In an essay entitled “Shame,” published in 2011, two years after Arcan’s tragic death by suicide at the age of thirty-six, she reflected in the third person on the traumatizing experience: “The whole world’s judgment was reflected on her fallen face, that night, and then it slid down into her cleavage. In the hollow of her corseted breasts lodged the oldest story to afflict women, that of the examined body, the history of their shame.”
Her essay details the toll this media appearance took on her already precarious mental health: in her account, she subsequently locked herself inside for days, obsessively staring at herself in the black designer dress and trying to figure out where she had erred.
When a well-meaning friend took it away from her, Arcan reports that she drove back to Holt Renfrew and bought a second one so she could continue ruminating. The publication of this essay in the posthumous collection Burqa of Skin provoked a reckoning in the media that became known as the “Affaire Nelly Arcan.” Critics excoriated Tout le monde en parle for her sexist treatment, while host Lepage doubled down on his approach.
In many ways, the scandal never went away. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of Whore’s release, it’s worth noting her critics remain chronically incapable of treating her literary work as anything other than veiled autobiography. Arcan’s history as a sex worker, in other words, essentially guaranteed that she would be sexualized and discounted as a serious writer.
Arcan’s televised humiliation is an extreme example—different in degree, maybe, rather than kind—of the backlash many women writers face when their sexuality enters the rarified arena of literary culture. Feminist critics have also repeatedly shown how female writers are sexualized by the media machine—by being given the “bathing suit treatment” on their covers, for instance.
It is virtually impossible to imagine a male writer being marketed like Arcan. Although her books were not memoirs, the use of her photograph on their covers played up their autobiographical content. The aesthetics of these black and white images are part boudoir, part sad girl: the second edition of Hysteric—Arcan’s sophomore novel, and like Whore, a work of autofiction—features a headshot of the corseted author staring smoulderingly off into the middle distance. A close-up of her brooding tear- and mascara-stained face adorns a re-issue of Whore and the English translation of Burqa of Skin. Her face is also incorporated into the cover design of Whore, peering out at the reader from behind a curtain of black eyelashes and, for Gothic effect, a blood red semi-transparent cross.
Arcan herself was at the very least ambivalent about this approach. In one of her earliest interviews, she insisted that “above all, I don’t want people to interest themselves in the image of the prostitute as object of curiosity; everyone knows what that is, let’s not come pretending to want to learn something more . . . I want people to listen to me, to see me, as a writer.” She would repeat this refrain—that she wanted to be taken seriously as a writer—throughout her career.
Initially, she tried to anticipate the media frenzy by refusing interview requests and “remaining incognito,” but her resolve crumbled within weeks of Whore’s publication as she was swept up in the publicity machine. By the time of her appearance on Tout le monde en parle, photoshoots had avowedly become the most dreaded aspect of her vocation. Paradoxically, however, Arcan relished being in the spotlight, creating what Marine Gheno calls “a vicious circle”: “she is hurt when people talk to her about her body rather than her writing, but she seeks out celebrity and the media spectacle.”
While Arcan’s proximity to actual sex work—along with her surgically enhanced, hyperfeminine body—were read as more salient data points than the literary merit of her novels, it is important to note that her public identity was itself highly performative and self-contradictory. As a result, all attempts at biographical portrait have thus far taken cubist approaches. Anne Émond’s 2016 biopic Nelly, for instance, braids together four independent storylines starring personas culled from Arcan’s life and work: the writer, the lover, the sex worker, and the celebrity. Émond explained this choice on the grounds that while researching for the film, she “spoke with some of [Arcan’s] friends, boyfriends, editors, and it was like they were talking about 1000 different people and [Émond] was like, ‘Okay, she had a complicated life and she lied a lot!’”
Along the same lines, Arcan’s friend Claudia Larochelle describes I want a house made of emergency exits—a collection of writings by friends and acquaintances of the late author—as a “kaleidoscope” assembled in place of the biography she found it impossible to produce.
While Arcan was a highly visible public figure, her inconsistent self-performance can be read as a series of evasive manoeuvres designed to guard against the prurient reductionisms of critics unable to accept that a beautiful woman, much less a former sex worker, could also be a talented writer. She was notoriously hard to pin down, because of both her deliberate obfuscations and the internal contradictions she embodied. Even her name was a dodge: Nelly Arcan was the pseudonym of Isabelle Fortier. She chose it, with input from her mother, as an homage to Nellie Oleson of Little House on the Prairie, a show the two would watch together when she was a child.
This wholesome origin story is at odds both with the hypersexualized signifier her name would become and with the scathing portrait of the mother figure in Whore, a “larva” whose apathy and sexlessness is a source of disgust. Arcan said that she made the decision to take a pseudonym on the spur of the moment, but that it ultimately became a crucial “barrier between me and the character of Nelly Arcan, between me and the others who read my books. It’s a bit like prostitution: having another name is purely symbolic.”
In interviews, Arcan brazenly lied about the details of her life, such as her age and her surgical enhancements. She also strategically renegotiated the (non-) fictional content of her work, sometimes embracing and at other times rejecting the autobiographical frame as deterministic and limiting. Scholars have noted the shift in tone from her earliest interviews, conducted in France, where she was comfortable with the conflation of her life and writing; once returned to Quebec, Arcan was more insistent on differentiating herself from her characters.
One can attribute this shift to her growing sense of confinement in the novelistic persona she had initially—perhaps owing to inexperience or the desire to establish herself—been content to inhabit. This uncoupling, however, proved challenging for the public in the years to come, given that her face was plastered on the books, which, in turn, played on the line between fact and fiction.
Arcan’s untimely death forced a re-evaluation of her work and persona. Posthumously, she was transformed from a frivolous, middlebrow enfant terrible into a subject of serious erudite study. Critics have been perturbed that Arcan embraced conventional scripts of female beauty and sexuality. Feminist critics have had a difficult time figuring out what to make of her contradictory politics, her obsession with death, and her grim view of female subjectivity. For others—like the Tout le monde en parle panelists—her manicured, surgically enhanced good looks were evidence of hypocrisy, given the biting assault on beauty culture she levelled on the page. Their absolutist logic is unable to parse the messy reality that a person can be intellectually critical of the same norms in which they are psychically invested.
It is important not to advance facile autobiographical readings of Whore—a novel that she avowedly wrote “next to reality,” Arcan was obsessed with others’ perceptions of her and remarkably forthcoming about the extent to which she felt “trapped” by “the tyranny of beauty.” As she told journalist Pascale Navarro: “When I enter a depanneur and I see all those magazines full of teenagers posing, I suffocate; I’m simultaneously fascinated by that femininity and panicked. I absolutely must be the most beautiful. If it’s not me, it’s them: and so then, who am I?”
In both her fiction and non-fiction, Arcan repeated the phrase “burqa of skin” to describe the way that social norms become inscribed on the body: the self-mastery of the gym bunny or surgically enhanced woman is, she implies, a form of self-masking coerced by patriarchal society.
In an ideal world, her subtle critique of sexual politics would gain energy from its grounding in the lived experience of its author; in actual fact, it was blunted by an excessive focus on her body. As Arcan reflected, “When readers know that the author is dramatized in a book, it fixes their attention on this fact. While reading, they tell themselves, ‘it’s her life, it’s her life, it’s her life.’ Then they tend to make the writer pay for her ‘sin.’ The life is judged, the writer is judged, her process is judged.”
This comment ultimately reveals a double bind that, though painfully overt in Arcan’s case, applies to many women who use their personal lives as the basis for their art: that no matter how hard they try to be writers, they run the risk of being dismissed as whores.
Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Evasive Manoeuvres: Canadian Women’s Confessional Writing by Myra Bloom, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2026.
