Born in Oran, Algeria, the author spent her childhood in France's former colony. This title is her memoir of a preadolescence that shaped her with intense feelings of alienation, yet also contributed, in a paradoxically essential way, to her development as a writer and philosopher.

A meditation on postcolonial identity and gender, "Reveries of the Wild Woman" is also a poignant recollection of how a girl's childhood is, indeed, author to the woman.