Houellebecq’s mother gets her revenge

Hell hath no fury like a women scorned... especially if that woman is your mother, a fact that the ageing enfant terrible of French letters, Michel Houellebecq (pictured), is now all too aware.

In his best-selling novel Les Particules Elementaires [the English version was called Atomised], Houellebecq included a ghastly portrait of a mother figure - a women who finds the "burden of caring for a small child" incompatible with "personal freedom".

In the novel, the women leaves her young son in an attic and goes in search of sex on a dubious commune in the south of France. It is widely assumed that this character was not unlike his own "old slut of a mother."

Now Lucie Ceccaldi - Houellebecq changed his name to distance himself from his family - has hit back at her son in a book that claims to give an accurate account of their relationship. In the postscript of the book, called L’innocente, she writes: "Michel and I could begin to talk to each other again the day he goes to the public square and says: 'I am a liar, I am an impostor, I've done nothing in my life except do bad to the people around me, and I ask for forgiveness.' Killing your mother was in fashion at the time."

Houellebecq, who now lives in Ireland, has not responded to her attack. And he may not do so. On his blog in 2006, following the publication of an unflattering biography of him to which she contributed, he said of her: "She is too egocentric to produce a significant account of anything other than herself."