I can’t resist inventing an analysis. Patronizing? Intrusive? Playing Calle’s game, perhaps. Assembling a collage from the autobiographical scraps of information Calle lets fall, I see a young woman with divorced parents, from a wealthy background, not knowing how to live and not knowing what it is to have a self. Her father supports her financially and gives her a flat, so she is able to stay stuck as a little girl, playing. Her mother has not watched her fondly, and so she makes the camera’s eye caress her instead. Losing both parents, she’s curious about the primal scene. And so she peeps at honeymoon couples in hotel rooms and trails after strangers. Lacking desire, she has to get others to lay down the rules for her life, which she rehearses rather than lives. Insecure about others’ love, she manipulates friends into giving her presents and coming to dinner, and has to arrange for men to look at her. Unsure how to interact with others, she sets up coded exchanges and rituals. She can’t exist without an audience. She’s got to have it. To be witnessed. That’s to say: noticed and loved and approved of. Her book’s a cry. It blooms in the voyeuristic gap created by alienation and inauthenticity. Poor sad little rich girl.

From Michéle Roberts’ book review of Sophie Calle’s Double Game, London: Violette Edition, 1999, in Tate, No. 22, Summer 2000, p. 43.