amours fous; Frenchwomen may not get fat, but as two new books attest, they're not immune to mishaps of the heart.(Nothing Serious)(Tete a Tete)(Brief Article)(Book Review)

Byline: Megan O'grady

After novelist Justine Levy's husband left her for model turned singer Carla Bruni-to the delight of French tabloids-Levy wrote a searing roman a clef that shot to the top of European best-seller lists. Nothing Serious (Melville House) recounts the breakup of an intellectual young Parisian couple at the hands of a man-eating mannequin dubbed the Terminator: "beautiful and bionic, with the look of a killer." But in Levy's deft hands, what could have been recycled pulp takes on surprising nuance. The daughter of philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, she understands that the power of her story is in its stream-of-consciousness honesty, and this smart, gutsy depiction of the end of a first love-"so happy we were to be together, happy and proud, two happy idiots"-feels harrowingly true.

Getting to the truth of the much-mythologized relationship between Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre proves a far trickier matter in Tete a Tete (Harper Collins), Hazel Rowley's chronicle of what many regard as the greatest literary love story ...