She enrolled at Sciences Po in 2002 to study literature. She blazed through the great Russian writers, developing a lasting attachment to Chekhov, and devoured Zweig and Kundera. She met her husband, Antoine, a Paris banker, at a bar in 2005. “He came up to me and asked for my number, and I said, ‘I’m not giving it to you,’ ” she told me. “ ‘But I’ll meet you three days from now at 8 P.M. in front of the Saint-Germain church.’ ” The barman told her that her future children would be cursed if she didn’t show up. She did, investing the affair with dramatic momentum and inverting the trajectory, familiar to many highly educated women of her generation, of finding professional fulfillment before love.

For a while, Slimani thought she wanted to do something in cinema. After completing a well-known acting course, she appeared in two films, playing a model in one and a soccer player’s girlfriend in the other. Then she went to business school, earning a degree in media studies. In 2008, the year she married Antoine, she landed a job covering Morocco and Tunisia at the newsweekly Jeune Afrique. She was spending two weeks a month in North Africa. The travel was brutal, especially once she had a toddler at home. After getting arrested in western Tunisia while reporting on the fallout of the Arab Spring, she decided to go freelance, in order to work on a novel. She once recalled, “I knew that people were laughing behind my back, saying, ‘Her husband earns a decent living. This story about writing, it’s a polite way of saying that she’s kept.’ ”

She devoted a year and a half to the novel. “It was just after the Arab Spring, so it was about a country that resembled Morocco but was never specified, where there had been a sort of revolution a bit like the one in Tunisia,” she said. “Frankly, it was really boring.” The dozens of publishers to whom she shopped the manuscript concurred, unanimously rejecting it. Later, she considered this a lucky break. When an interviewer asked why she hadn’t published an autobiographical first novel, she responded, “Because I’m North African, and I didn’t want to identify myself uniquely with that. I told myself: You’re going to weave a web in which you’re going to imprison yourself, when you have in front of you a much larger horizon.”

In 2013, Slimani’s family enrolled her in a writing workshop as a Christmas gift. The class, run by Jean-Marie Laclavetine, an eminent editor at Gallimard and a novelist, was intended strictly for hobbyists. “No manuscript should be brought by participants with a view to publication,” the brochure warned. The idea of joining a roomful of wannabe de Beauvoirs was embarrassing for Slimani. “I was thinking, What if I don’t have any ideas, and what if I can’t come up with anything to write? And what if I suck and everyone’s looking at me, thinking I suck?” Slimani said. “But, at the same time, I thought it was a good thing to confront exactly that risk.” It was a claustrophobic time. She’d quit her job and had nothing to show for it. Antoine, who’d badly injured his leg in a kitesurfing accident, could barely leave the house.

Laclavetine was immediately struck by Slimani’s pages. She was trying to develop something about a nymphomaniac—an idea she’d had a couple of years earlier while sitting on the couch, nursing her son and watching the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair unfold on the news. “She knew that she had something very particular to tell,” Laclavetine told me. He took on Slimani as a protégée and encouraged her to purify her style, ignoring her characters’ thoughts and focussing on their actions. She later characterized this advice as one of “several keys that made me understand why, without doubt, my first manuscript had been rejected.”

Gallimard published Slimani’s first novel, “Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre” (“In the Ogre’s Garden”), to excellent reviews, in 2014. The main character, Adèle Robinson, has a gastroenterologist husband with a hurt leg, a young son, and a job at a newspaper. She tries to maintain her respectability, “to be good,” but, whenever lust sparks, an untamable part of her is ready to burn down everything in her life. Her desire is monstrous, even to her. “In the shower, she wants to scratch herself, to tear her body in two,” Slimani writes. “She bangs her forehand against the wall. She wants somebody to seize her, to break her skull against the window.” Instead of going to work, Adèle shows up at the apartment of a man she barely knows for a mechanical assignation that serves, at best, as a temporary release from her torment. She misses an appointment at the pediatrician “for a fuck that lasted too long” and can’t bring herself to schedule another. Her shame radiates from the page. Slimani told me, “There are people who give themselves over to their sexuality, there are people who lose themselves in it, but, for me, sex is something very painful, very melancholy, because one sees oneself.”

The first time Slimani and I met, it felt ridiculous: a working mother writing a story about a working mother who had written a book about a working mother. It was July, and when I arrived at the café we’d agreed upon she was waiting—a textbook Parisienne with her coffee and her cigarettes and some great outfit, perched on a rattan stool. I was hugely pregnant with my second child. Slimani, who had given birth to a daughter two months earlier, showed me a picture of her baby and asked after mine. She wasn’t breastfeeding this time around, she said, without apology. (I had recently heard her declare with equal ease, on a podcast, “I claim the fact that it’s sometimes boring to play with my son.”) She wanted to make the most of her Goncourt tenure. “A year isn’t much in the life of a family,” she told me.

After “Dans le Jardin de l’Ogre” came out, one of Slimani’s former colleagues told a reporter that its racier passages had raised some eyebrows around the office but that “what surprised us the most was the darkness of the book. Nobody saw her as someone who was capable of expressing such a keen despair.” At the café, it was equally difficult to imagine her as someone who had spent lonely years in Paris, who had struggled to figure out what she was meant to do or bummed around her apartment feeling like a nonentity. When I asked her whether she’d hesitated in taking on sex addiction as the subject of her first novel, she said, “The thing wasn’t to dare to write about nymphomania—it was to dare to write.”

Her characters, like her, want things. Adèle wants sex; Myriam wants work. Of another character in “Chanson Douce,” who once employed Louise as a caretaker for his elderly mother, Slimani writes, “What he wanted for his mother was a friend, a nanny, a tender-hearted woman who would listen to her ravings without rolling her eyes, without sighing.” In Slimani’s appraisal, the emotional marketplace has rendered basic human entitlements a luxury. “It’s the question of, Can we buy everything with money? Can we, in earning a good living, procure for ourselves comfort and freedom?” she said. “But does that also mean that those who don’t have the means will never be able to attain that comfort and that freedom?” Whenever we met, we were both able to be there because of a parasitic chain of caretaking that inevitably, discreetly, leaves someone alone at the bottom end. “Darling, you’re naïve,” Myriam’s father-in-law tells his wife, who believed that her generation would change the world. “Women are capitalists, just like men.”