Leila Slimani’s latest book, I’ll Take the Fire, is the third in a trilogy inspired by the generations of her Moroccan French family. She is also the author of the bestselling thriller The Perfect Nanny. He is photographed above in Paris on March 17, 2026.
Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images
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Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images
As a child in Morocco, novelist Leila Slimani sometimes felt she lived inside a bubble: there were rules for behavior inside the home, where the family was “very liberal, very free” and a different set of rules for the outside world.
“(My parents) always told us, ‘Outside you have to be quiet. Outside you have to be afraid of the Islamists,'” she says. “So you have to hide everything that you are. You have to hide everything you think.”
Slimani’s grandmother is French and his grandfather is Moroccan. He was raised in a “very complex and multilingual family”.
In Morocco, Slimani saw that women were treated like second-class citizens. Both her grandmother and maternal grandmother were illiterate, and her mother encouraged her to obtain an education so that she would never be financially dependent on a man. Moving to France for school when she was 18, Slimani expected to experience a new sense of freedom. Instead, she was disappointed by what she found in Paris.
“There were people following you on the subway and on the street at night,” she says. “I was very disappointed to find out that my fantasy about the West and my fantasy about this world where women were completely free was a fantasy and not completely true.”
In 2016, Slimani won France’s top literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, for his novel. chanson douce (Published in English as) perfect granny). His latest novel, i will take fireThe third book in a trilogy of books about a Moroccan French family whose members grapple with questions of identity.
“Are they French or Moroccan? Are they Muslims or unbelievers?” says Slimani. “We must be very, very careful of all those people who are forcing us to choose a side. I think familiarity can definitely be very comforting. But it can also be dangerous. Therefore, for me this question of belonging is a very moral question. This is a moral question.”
Interview highlights
On being vocal as a child, and how that led to writing
I was always outspoken and my parents were always very, very afraid that something would happen to me. … There’s sometimes a person in your family who is rebellious, someone who doesn’t accept the norms, who doesn’t accept the rules. And I was this kind of young girl. And when I was probably 7 or 8 years old, I had a fight with my father. I did something and he yelled at me and I answered him. And he said, You do not answer to your father. And I said, “It’s my mouth and I say whatever I want.” In French, I said “c’est ma bouche.”
And then it was my nickname for a very long time. My father used to call me “C’est ma bouche” because I was always talking and it was impossible for me to shut up or remain calm when I was feeling something. I had a very strong sense of injustice and it was something that really destroyed me. And I think that’s how I started writing, because I was always saying to my grandmother, “This is so unfair, this is unfair.” And one day she said, “Yes, it’s unfair, life is unfair and you will see and understand. So maybe write about it and maybe you can resolve it or you can try to correct this injustice through writing.”
on her mother’s advice
My mother, first of all, she told us at a very young age, because I have two sisters, the first thing she said and which she repeated for years and years and years and years was that you have to be financially independent, never depend on any man. So you have to study, study, study, and you have to find a job and earn your money and never give up on the dream of marrying someone who is rich and who will take care of you. And the second thing is knowledge. My mother always said that a woman’s first weapon is knowledge, the more books you read, the more independent you will be.
On linking sexuality with fear
For me, I think my view of sexuality was very dark. I was always worried. I was unable to give myself over to sexuality because ever since I became a woman, my mother always talked to me about sex as if she was telling me about danger. Danger of getting pregnant, danger of going to jail, danger of being raped. All the dangers. So for me, being a woman was dangerous and I was always afraid. I always thought that someone was judging me, that I wasn’t a good enough woman, that I wasn’t doing the right thing. And I was thinking that it was impossible for us women to be innocent, that from the beginning we were guilty, guilty of something. But I couldn’t understand and I couldn’t know exactly what I was guilty of.
On leaving journalism to write fiction
The beautiful thing about fiction is that you can write about things you don’t know about, and you can also write about things you didn’t see, that you didn’t experience. This is the beauty of imagination. And that’s exactly what you can’t do if you’re a journalist. You must tell the truth. This is the goal of your work. And I think I wanted to write about a different kind of truth, the truth of emotions, the truth of our human condition.
On admitting to being selfish in your work
Being a writer makes me selfish because I’m selfish with my time. I’m selfish with space, and I guess that’s not a very likable thing to say, but often I’m just waiting for people to adapt to my schedule and adapt to my view of things because my goal and my only goal and passion is to write a novel. And so I believe that my husband, my children, everybody should understand this and they should all adapt to this. I know it’s very selfish, but it is just the way it is. And it would be impossible for me to change it.
Thea Chaloner And Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper, and Beth Novy adapted it for the Web.
