Valérie Valère

Valérie Valère was the pseudonym of Valérie Samama (1 November 1961 – 17 December 1981), a French writer.

She published her first work, the book Le Pavillon des enfants fous, in 1978 after spending four months confined to a psychiatric hospital for anorexia nervosa. The book is an autobiographical account covering her relationship with her abusive parents, experiences as a child in French society, and in particular her institutionalized years. Critics praised her style of writing and her expressive, philosophically sophisticated articulations of systemic mistreatment and misunderstanding. Scholar Richard A. Mazzara likens her work to Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hermann Hesse, André Gide, and Virginia Woolf.

Valérie Samama was born in the 15th arrondissement of Paris to a family of Tunisian origin.

At age 13, after a family shock, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital for anorexia nervosa. Two years later she wrote a book about it, Le Pavillon des enfants fous ("The mad children's ward"), published in 1978 by Editions Stock. On Bernard Pivot's talk show Apostrophes, 27 April 1979, she said that she had received ten rejection letters from publishers before Stock accepted her manuscript. Her book criticizes the hospital setting in which she spent four months, describing it as coercive, humiliating and dehumanizing for the patients.

In parallel with her studies at the lycée Racine in Paris, she took courses in tightrope walking at the school of Annie Fratellini. She saw the circus, like writing, as a way to escape reality. After obtaining her baccalauréat, she left to study at the Sorbonne.