Writer-Director Durga Chew-Bose on Françoise Sagan’s ‘Bonjour Tristesse’—And 7 More Books That Inspired Her First Film

Cécile (Lily McInerny) reading her novel, Claudia, Claudia—an oblique reference to one of Chew-Bose’s favorite actresses, Monica Vitti. (Vitti played a character named Claudia in Michelangelo Antonioni’s evocative, Mediterranean-set L’Avventura.)

As for the film’s source material, Chew-Bose says that making Bonjour Tristesse significantly deepened her appreciation for Sagan’s very real novel. “I definitely feel very protective of it now,” she says. “I’m also just awed by how young was when she wrote it, and how it’s still part of our conversation now.” Still, it was far from the only book to influence Chew-Bose’s vision for Bonjour Tristesse, and its heady exploration of memory, beauty, and womanhood.

Below, Chew-Bose shares with Vogue the writers and texts that helped to shape her first film.

The Lover by Marguerite Duras

I always return to Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. One of the reasons why I love this book so much is because I love any book that’s about memory, and about remembering certain women who crystallized womanhood to you, or crystallized motherhood, or crystallized fashion, or crystallized an elegant gesture. I’ve always romanticized that in my life, and whenever I’ve encountered it in a book, like, time pauses. Marguerite Duras is so good at remembering women as they are—and not in a memorializing way. I also feel the book’s very true to what it’s like to be in the mind of a young woman.

Taking Care by Joy Williams

With Joy Williams, it’s like you’re reading something that’s about to curdle—but then it never fully curdles. You’re in her grip the whole time. These characters are very ordinary people who have extremely dark paths or have made dark decisions, and you sort of read it like you’re looking over your shoulder. I also just find her prose really cool. Your heart rate is really racing, and then you finish the story and you feel altered. I remember her mentioning how it’s really important to stay open to signs and omens because the moment you close yourself off from that sort of thinking, magical or not, you’ll stop receiving them. And I feel that’s really in her writing, too. Like, she’s a writer who is very plain-spoken in her prose, but is also clearly so susceptible to, like, a deer running across a highway. It’s really spooky, even when nothing scary happens.

Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now by Eleanor Coppola

I only brought two books with me when we made Bonjour, and this was one of them. A lot of it is about motherhood and a lot of it is about how fraught marriage can be, especially between two creative people, which I also find really interesting. It’s about watching Francis make Apocalypse Now and it’s really, really intimate—there are scenes where she’s just describing everyday life stuff that happens on set, or when you’re living far away from home for a production. I find that when you read people’s diaries, you can get a good sense that they’re good at telling stories because somehow, within a very short entry, they capture what life is about. I returned to this book often because she is very honest about her frustrations, and I just admire people who can be really candid about their personal lives.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf

I could have chosen any book by Virginia Woolf, but I think about The Waves the most. I’m not the most plot-driven person, so maybe that’s why it’s stayed with me. The first time I read it, I had no idea what was happening, and it was really frustrating me—in the same way as when someone tells you something about yourself that maddens you, but is ultimately true. I think I kind of see them in the same world; a book orbits me longer if I’m not immediately pleased by it. This one was close to my mind when I was on set; I think the freeness of the text was always inspiring to me.

Talk Stories by Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid’s Talk Stories is a good refresher on how to enter a scene. She’s the greatest writer when it comes to characterizing a person in a single sentence or characterizing something that everybody knows about, but almost as if they’ve never seen it that way before. For the stories about someone who’s very famous, you feel like you’re meeting them for the first time. Every time you read her Talk Stories, you’re sort of like: Oh, this is what writing is. I think it’s really good to read writers like that, who just remind you that you’re sort of nothing in comparison. She’s also just so confident and effortless that you feel like you’re reading gossip.

A Girl’s Story by Annie Ernaux

A Girl’s Story has also been really important to me as I’ve been thinking about Bonjour. Ernaux’s way of writing memory—retrieving a summer, retrieving past love—is very honest about how memory is all just fragments. When I read the book, it felt like she was trying to retrieve the past but free herself of it at the same time, which is something I relate to. I don’t feel like writing is therapeutic, but I feel like it helps you return and leave at the same time.

Collected Stories by Shirley Hazzard

I was recently reading Collected Stories and they were moving me so much, in a way that felt like candy. You know that feeling when you read a book and you’re sort of like: I want to become best friends with the writing? Zoe Heller wrote something about Shirley Hazzard’s writing, which was very comforting to me: “In Hazzard’s work, beauty in whatever form—a sentence or a table setting—has a moral value.” When I read that, I wanted to throw the book across the room because I was like, yeah, beauty does have a moral value—and it cannot be dismissed. You are getting that from Shirley Hazzard’s prose. It’s so hard to do, and she does it and it builds worlds.