How Proust and Hockney Can Lift Your Spirits

Catherine Cusset in conversation with Elisabeth Ladenson

One has a reputation for being a difficult writer; the other is an easy painter, accessible to all. Catherine Cusset has devoted a novel to the British David Hockney and a personal essay to Marcel Proust. In their work she finds a life lesson, inspiration, comfort, irony, and a certainty: that art is a life saver, and that you should only write, or paint, what matters to you.

Catherine Cusset is an award-winning, bestselling author of 15 novels, including Le problème avec Jane (Grand Prix des lectrices d’Elle 2000); Confessions d’une radine; Un brillant avenir (Prix Goncourt des Lycéens 2008), L’autre qu’on adorait (Finalist for the Prix Goncourt 2016), Vie de David Hockney (Prix Anaïs Nin 2018) and La définition du bonheur. Her most recent book, Ma vie avec Marcel Proust (My Life with Marcel Proust), in 2025, was awarded the Léo Scheer and Céleste Albaret prizes, and her novel on David Hockney was republished in an illustrated version with 50 paintings by the British artist.

Elisabeth Ladenson is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Columbia.  Among her other areas of expertise, she is a Proust scholar, the author of Proust’s Lesbianism; and Dirt for Art's Sake: Books on Trial from Madame Bovary to Lolita.  She is currently at work on a book called Proust in the Margins: Jew, Homosexual, Snob.

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