Lou Syrah is a Paris-based writer and journalist, whose recent novella, Fuck Eat Kill, has been nominated for the Prix Sade, a prestigious literary award for transgressive literature. The granddaughter of an imam, president of the Association des amis de Gabrielle Wittkop, Syrah writes to reconcile her multifarious identities. I sat down with her to discuss the stigmatization of female desire, its historical repression, and the possibility for liberation from the male gaze that writing erotic literature affords.
How did you get into writing?
It was pretty natural for me, I’ve always written. As a teenager, I kept notebooks where I vented my sadness through poetry. I continued writing but moved towards journalism professionally, becoming an investigative journalist. I began my short career by joining Le Canard Enchaîné at just 24 while I was finishing my studies in Paris. I was a bit of a social anomaly in the editorial office. This may not resonate with American or Anglo-Saxon readers besides those who live in Paris, but the media is a true institution in France. Before it was recently tainted by a fictitious employment scandal, Le Canard was known as the media outlet that denounced corruption using satire. It’s a bit like the more serious big brother of Charlie Hebdo. For example, many cartoonists have worked for both outlets. This was the case with Cabu, who was brutally murdered during the Islamist attacks of 2015. He was a key byline of the newspaper.
After leaving Le Canard Enchaîné, I began writing under a pseudonym for a competitor, Mediapart, another investigative outlet.
I also published a non-fiction novel, Louisa, with La Goutte D’or. In it, I recounted my inquiry into an old news story that took place in my region. It was the story of a young girl who died during an exorcism. Through this investigation, I was able to delve into my own family history and lift the veil on a family secret. I discovered that the Algerian side of my family, which had experienced war and the trauma of exile, was also haunted by stories of the devil and demons and ultimately by their own skeletons.
I think that something changed in my perception of storytelling and of the world at that moment. I realized that factual writing had been a kind of refuge from a family secret that I had had to carry as a child. Looking back, my choice to go into journalism was pretty logical. I grew up in a world of lies and religious myths. My family is practicing Muslim, and involved in that religion on one side, while the other side is Catholic, with practices linked to popular folklore. Writing that first book allowed me to set myself free, laying on the table a family secret that no one else had wanted to broach. Once that burden was laid aside, I felt free to do something else.
I continued with journalist, but the format no longer suited me.
Journalistic writing is a pretty restrictive form: a writing of facts with a strict truth-regime. There is no room for emotion, subjectivity, or feeling.
In journalism, facts prevail as though they were superior truth. I’m not saying that facts should disappear beneath feelings, commentary, or worse, alternative truths. I obviously don’t subscribe to all those fashionable conspiracy theories. I do, however, think that there are many ways to narrate reality, and that in order to reach the reader we have to consider the full spectrum of available narratives.
I wrote Fuck Eat Kill at the very moment in my life when I felt at liberty to submit the fiction I’d been writing for years but keeping to myself. A few months ago, for example, I sold two of my dreams. I’ve been writing my dreams for as long as I can remember. Fuck Eat Kill was actually inspired by poems written in my dream journals.
How would you categorize Fuck Eat Kill in terms of genre?
I think we could all agree to call this an erotic short story, but one that mixes several forms. The cannibalism theme does not, however, put it in the category of a horror story. It is the story of a young girl suffering from an acute inter-sensory disorder: a complete synesthesia. She drinks colours, eats sounds, touches scents. This illness causes her to eat the things that she desires, and kill the things that attack her. Linking cannibalism with female desire is a pretty classic association if you think about it. In this text, I am mocking the myth of “the devouring female”, which has caused a lot of harm to women over the course of centuries. It was long believed that women carried an insatiable sex-starved monster between their legs, and that they must therefore be tamed, through their clothing or by raping them, or by any means that would restrain their libidos. There is also the myth of the toothed vagina, vagina dentata in Latin. This symbolic or real belief in the presence of teeth within female genitals, which caught a second wind through psychoanalysis and the concept of castration. All of this has perpetuated a form of fear surrounding female desire.
Despite its advances, the heterosexual imagination remains tainted by the idea that female desire is either disgusting or pathological. Repulsive and dangerous, in short.
Even though it’s about cannibalism, the story isn’t necessarily gory. There’s an effort of language that tends more toward eroticism than horror or porn. Particularly because the writing is poetic. The use of poetry here makes sense, primarily because it’s a text of sensoriality, but also because it’s a text of displacement. It lets you approach sex and eroticism by liberating yourself from the male gaze. I decided to find an alternative language to talk about desire. It also allowed me to de-objectify the desired body. I don’t use the word “fuck,” for example, attached to a person. In my text, people don’t fuck each other, they fuck the forest.
I think, as Monique Wittig said, that we enter into writing as though we were entering an enemy arena, and all the more so in erotic writing where our imaginations are trapped. I think that we can find our own language to talk about sex through freeing ourselves from the male gaze. There is cannibalism, incidentally, in The Lesbian Body. I could have written a much trashier short story. A lot of people in my entourage tell me that I have a fixation on the morbid.
It’s true that on close inspection I’ve always been drawn to subjects related to death. Or, to be more precise, it’s never repulsed me. During lockdown, I investigated the treatment of Covid-19 deaths. I was the only journalist to go into the giant morgue that was set up in a former fruit and vegetable warehouse on the outskirts of Paris. I’ve also worked on the devil, and on hatred. I come from a position of marginality, so I work on the margins. For me, it’s very natural. Like anyone who has experienced childhood trauma, death is an integral part of my life. I don’t deny it. I think it exists in all things. I believe in the beautiful and in the excremental, and I have no false sense of prudishness about combining the two in one story. Life is a mix of the two.
Fuck Eat Kill is an English title. What does the English language bring to the text?
It’s kind of funny because I didn’t agree with the editors about the title. I wanted to call it Faim (Hunger), to emphasize the notion of sensation. The editors wanted to call it Chair (Flesh). I ended up saying, “Fine, let’s just call it Fuck Eat Kill.“
I didn’t want to call it Chair (Flesh) because flesh is an object, not an emotion. I was signing books recently at the Paris Book Festival, and people were coming up to me and asking if the title has anything to do with the Julia Roberts film Eat Pray Love. My mother asked me the same question. I said, “No, no, it has nothing to do with that, mom.” In hindsight, I kind of like the idea that people might be misled. I also like the childish idea of the three-part rhyme. It reminds me of the game Fuck Marry Kill. These are actually the only English words that appear in the text. Their use is deliberately provocative.
In French literature, English is still considered an unclean language. It’s the language of capitalism, of the market, of entertainment. But the truth is that people in the academic and literary worlds have a problem with all foreign languages. You just have to look at the number of stupid and racist polemics in France as soon as a black person or an Arab puts one word of dialect in a French song. It gets blown out of proportion. The same problem comes up with youth slang. There is a kind of fear of contamination of the language. The English title made me uncomfortable at first. I was afraid that people would mistake my writing for something it wasn’t. But then I thought about Baise-moi by Virginie Despentes and J’irai cracher sur vos tombes by Boris Vian and I told myself that I didn’t really care about the title. I kind of liked messing around with conventions.
Your last book, Louisa, addressed the subject of exorcism. What is your relationship with Catholicism?
I was baptized at the behest of my mother, who is Catholic. It obviously wasn’t my choice. My father, who is Muslim, acquiesced, most likely telling himself, “Okay, go ahead and try, Catholic God, to take my daughter, but you won’t get her soul because she was born Muslim.” Then he said a prayer in Arabic in the church, perhaps as a sort of counter-spell. Or perhaps it was a sort of communion on his own, and in that case it’s a beautiful story. My mother’s Catholic family practices the cult of the saints, worships the Virgin Mary, and goes on pilgrimages to Lourdes. They burn many candles on their mantle. I have no problem with these popular beliefs, and I even have a sort of sympathy for these types of monotheistic practice, which have often resisted the prohibitions of the clergy.
Generally speaking, I grew up in an atmosphere of familial mysticism, but it was communicated discreetly, in a relationship with love and nature. People have a hard time believing that religious imagination can be communicated among atheistic and secular families in France. But that’s more or less what happened to me. I didn’t have a religious education and I’m fiercely anti-clerical, and I write erotica. It isn’t incompatible. Some French erotic writers have had their mystic crisis, consider Georges Bataille, for example. And then the link between sex, death, and religion is fairly obvious, you just have to open the Bible or look at nuns in ecstasy. As for my own identity, I see myself as a sort of bastard, and I prefer this minority experience a thousand times over a more clean and tidy origin. The margins are my home. Everyone rejected the love between my parents, a French Catholic and an Algerian Muslim. It was a bit like reenacting the Algerian War, Romeo and Juliet or Titus and Berenice. I am proud to carry on their legacy.
Why did you choose to publish this text with Zone Critique in particular?
Actually, it was sort of random. I responded to an online call for submissions. I thought the winning short story would be published online. The people in charge of the call for submissions thought that the text was too good to be published only online. So they decided to publish it in their collection of short texts, which has already featured several well-known young authors like Daphnée Tamage, Olivier Liron, John Jefferson Selve, Josephine Tassy, and Sara Bourre.
You quote the author Gabrielle Wittkop. Are there other authors that you reference, either explicitly or more subtly?
Gabrielle Wittkop has been part of my interior library for a short time. I first encountered her in 2021, but I haven’t been able to live without her writing ever since then. I found her voice of comfort of it when I’m sad. I don’t have any particular inspirations for Fuck Eat Kill, or at least if I do, they inhabit me unconsciously.
I can, however, talk about my little personal treasures: words and images that I use and that travel from text to text. I’m thinking in particular about a passage in a collection of texts, La défense de l’infini by Louis Aragon, which contains the erotic short story Le con d’Irène with the superb illustrations by André Masson, or Les aventures de Jean Foutre La Bite. This collection of texts also contains Le cahier noir. At one point, Aragon writes that a woman “s’empare d’un homme comme l’eau des marais, par infiltration sourde”: this is the kind of phrase I carry around everywhere like a little treasure. It’s a visual phrase: we imagine the swamp, the stagnant water, even the noise, the texture, the thick and mysterious atmosphere of a dark and impenetrable nature. These types of sentences are like witchcraft. They have the power to speak to your heart and your ear.
I don’t explicitly reference Aragon, but I use a similar image in Fuck Eat Kill. In one of the sex scenes, I write, “…alors que sa paume me frôlait lentement aux extrémités, j’imaginais les cris que nous aurions en nous laissant aspirer définitivement l’une et l’autre par les sables mouvants.” It’s almost as if Aragon is hovering over the text here. I love the idea that words and images are independent and that they might come to rest on the pages like insects. They live their own lives. I have another treasure word like that, the verb “jasper,” as in “la jaspe,” the brightly coloured stone full of veins like marble. I remember the emotion I had while reading associated with learning this word. I was maybe 15 or 16 and had just purchased a copy of Les Orientales by Victor Hugo. The poem in question is called Les Tronçons du serpent. It goes:
« Je vis sur le sable un serpent jaune et vert, jaspé de taches noires. La hache en vingt tronçons avait coupé vivant . Son corps que l’onde arrose. Et l’écume des mers que lui jetait le vent. Sur son sang flottait rose. »
Reading this poem as a teenager was like drinking from the spring of a setting sun or emerging from a bath of blood. There was something magical about it, and I will remember it for the rest of my life. Every time I use this word, I reinvoke an emotion from my childhood reading. It’s pure witchcraft.
Fuck Eat Kill is now available from La Collection Vrilles. You can order a copy here.
Lou Syrah is an author and journalist who also works as a ghostwriter for other artists. She published Louisa with Éditions Goutte d’Or in 2020. Fuck Eat Kill, published in May 2025 in La Collection Vrilles has been included in the selection of the Prix Sade.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti
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