The Margot Affair 

The New Yorker Radio Hour, 2020

Sanaë Lemoine’s début novel, “The Margot Affair,” is about a seventeen-year-old high-school student named Margot and her complicated family. Her mother is a successful actress; her father is a prominent government official who lives with his wife and two sons and doesn’t acknowledge Margot or her mother publicly. In telling Margot’s story, Lemoine drew upon her own complex family history: when she was twenty-one, she discovered that her father had a secret second family.