Chéri
Aging and renounced desire again — dramatized there in the demi-monde, meditated on here in the first person.
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Break of Day
by Colette
A woman past fifty, alone in a Provence summer, decides what a life no longer organized around love can be.
- 1928
About Colette
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeA hybrid of novel, memoir, and meditation, Break of Day is narrated by a writer named Colette spending a summer in a house on the Mediterranean coast. In her early fifties, she weighs a possible last love affair against the freedom of relinquishing it, and measures herself against the memory of her mother, Sido, whose letters run through the book. Published in 1928, it is one of Colette's central works of late self-writing — less a story than a reckoning with aging, desire, and what to want after desire. (What's inside is described below.)
The story, in more detail
Break of Day is one of Colette's deliberate blurrings of fiction and autobiography. The narrator bears her name and much of her life, sits in a house much like the one Colette kept at Saint-Tropez, and thinks aloud about the questions Colette was living: what a woman's life becomes when she stops arranging it around sexual love, and whether that relinquishment is a loss or a homecoming.
The book has very little plot. Its action is inward — a summer of self-assessment, garden and sea observed with Colette's sensory exactness, and a decision taken quietly rather than dramatized. A younger man is drawn to the narrator, and the book's real event is her turning away from the affair and toward a differently ordered life.
Threaded through the meditation are letters from the narrator's mother, Sido. Colette shaped and rewrote her mother's real correspondence for the book, so the letters are literature rather than transcription — Sido as Colette needed her, presiding over a book about how to grow old.
What's inside
The narrator — a writer named Colette — is spending a summer alone in a house on the Mediterranean coast, in her early fifties. The book is her account of that season: the garden, the heat, the animals, the neighbors, and above all the question of what she now wants. A younger man, Valère Vial, is attached to the household and drawn to her; a younger woman, Hélène Clément, is drawn to him. The narrator watches the possibility of a late affair open in front of her and considers, without hurry, whether to take it.
Around this runs the presence of her mother, Sido, quoted through letters that Colette reworked from the real correspondence. Sido becomes the book's measure of how to live and how to relinquish — a woman who loved the world's particulars fiercely and let go of them without bitterness. The narrator tests her own aging against that example. The result is less a plot than a meditation: on desire, maturity, solitude chosen rather than suffered, and the daybreak the title promises — the start of a life no longer organized around being loved.
Why we recommend it
Colette's great book on growing old
It faces aging and the end of romantic love without either dread or consolation, and finds a daybreak on the far side of them.
Fiction and memoir, deliberately fused
One of her clearest experiments in autofiction, decades before the term — a narrator named Colette, invented and true at once.
Sido, at the center of the work
Her mother's presence, built from reworked letters, gives the book its measure of how to love the world and how to let it go.
What this book explores
The people in its pages
Colette (the narrator)
A writer named Colette, in her early fifties, spending a summer in Provence and deciding what to want after desire — invented and autobiographical at once.
Valère Vial
The younger man attached to the household and drawn to the narrator — the last love affair she considers and lets go.
Sido
The narrator's mother, present through reworked letters — the book's measure of how to love the world's particulars and how to relinquish them.
Bring it to book club
- The narrator is named Colette but the book is fiction. What does that fusion let Colette say that a straight memoir could not?
- Sido's letters are reworked, not quoted. Does knowing that change how you read the mother in the book?
- The narrator turns away from a last love affair. Is the book's daybreak a renunciation, a liberation, or both?
Timeline
1928
Break of Day is published, a central work of Colette's late self-writing.
1980
La Naissance du jour is adapted for the screen.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Flammarion
- 1928
Paperback
- Paperback
- Enid McLeod
Ebook
- Ebook
Reader reviews
Readers may also like
The Vagabond
The earlier first-person reckoning with independence, before age made the question different.
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Gigi
The Belle Époque courtship plot she could still write straight, set against this book's turn away from love entirely.
Read our takeBreak of Day: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Break of Day?
The French novelist Colette. La Naissance du jour was published in 1928.
Is Break of Day a novel or a memoir?
Both, by design. The narrator is named Colette and shares much of her life, but the book invents and shapes freely. It is best described as autobiographical fiction, or autofiction.
What is Break of Day about?
A writer named Colette, in her early fifties, spends a summer alone on the Mediterranean coast and weighs a possible last love affair against the freedom of giving it up. It is a meditation on aging, desire, and solitude more than a plotted story.
Who is Sido in the book?
Sido is the narrator's mother, present through letters. Colette built them from her real mother's correspondence, reworking the letters into literature rather than quoting them verbatim.
Is the narrator really Colette?
The narrator is named Colette and shares her circumstances, but she is a literary construction, not a straightforward self-portrait. The book plays deliberately with the line between author and character.