My favorite Hungarian author's very short memoir about how she became a writer in French. She writes of how she told stories as a kid, fled her native Hungary as a young mother, and finally lived forever after with a French dictionary at her side, meanwhile writing plays and then novels in her foreign French. Kristof fits a surprising amount in this tiny memoir. I didn't know anything about her ambivalence about having left Hungary, or about the French language, and her life as a refugee and Swiss watch factory worker. I feel a little weird knowing now that the Notebook trilogy was in part autobiographical (there's some really messed up stuff in there!), but I still want to re-read it. The intros and translators notes have some interesting information and background, but are not strictly necessary to understand the work, at least for someone familiar with Kristof. It makes it feel more fitting that I first read The Proof in Spanish, with a Spanish-English dictionary open, for a Spanish class that I got a D+ in.