Speaking the Margins is a long written conversation in which Chantal Maillard, with the collaboration of Muriel Chazalon, revisits the essential themes of her work, some closely linked to her life experience. Her most intimate voice emerges, a voice that questions what she has written, rediscovers it, refines it, and expands upon it.

“These conversations,” Chantal Maillard states, “have been much more to me than simple exchanges about what I’ve written. They were a demanding process that forced me to revise much of what I’ve said and explain to myself a journey whose meaning isn’t always clear to the one who undertakes it.”

Hunger as the driving force of the world, the morality of our fellow human beings and its limitations, the nature of what we consider monstrous, fictional mechanisms, the need to recover the intuition of reality beneath language, and the proposal of a method of mental observation for greater self-knowledge are some of the main issues that are raised and condensed in the nine chapters that make up this book.

Readers of Chantal Maillard will find in *Speaking the Margins* a valuable resource for enriching their rereading of her work and deepening their understanding of it. And those who are not yet familiar with her or have only read part of it will find in this book a guide to begin exploring her work in all its unsettling clarity.