Meet the author Constance Trautsolt

Meet French writer Constance Trautsolt for a talk on her brilliant first novel Pour la peau de Shirley Page (‘For the Sake of Shirley Page’)  which came out with Editions Harper Collins in 2024. 

Constance Trautsolt was born in 1989. She attended La Sorbonne and the Paris Institute of Political Studies before working for five years in North Africa, as part of the French embassies’ cultural network. She now lives in France and works in the performing arts industry.

About the book:

‘I would like to believe that such a story exists – a story with such distinct edges that you can distinguish it all in one go. A story that basically tells itself. Like a picture. If you believe, of course, that pictures don’t lie.’

Who was Shirley Page? A smiling young woman, with white skin and long hair. Allegedly, the name of the very first model employed by Kodak in the fifties to appear on their chromatic calibration cards. After she was gone, other ‘Shirleys’ followed – one long line of smiling, anonymous faces, somewhere deep in the laboratories of the legendary photography company.

When the narrator finds out that her mother briefly lived in the United States and became one of these Shirleys, curiosity turns into obsession. Why has nobody in her family ever told her about this before? And why does no one seem to want to talk about it now? In her attempts to break the silence and listen to what the pictures are trying to say she will force stories to resurface and intermingle – the stories of the women in her family, living and dead, and the stories of thousands of others.

A brilliant first novel where colour plays its part in revealing that which is hidden, Pour la peau de Shirley Page (‘For the Sake of Shirley Page’) is both the account of a forgotten part of the Kodak saga and a splendid take on love, family and transmission.