The offspring of teacher parents and seafaring grandparents, Eliane Cariou was born in Brittany in 1944. On finishing secondary school, she set off for Paris to read philosophy at the Sorbonne, later teaching at several lycées in the Paris region after getting her degree.
The 1970s and 80s saw her taking an active part in the struggle for women’s rights alongside Gisèle Halimi and the feminist movement Choisir la cause des femmes. A book co-penned by Halimi and the movement, Le programme commun des femmes, served as the manifesto for its candidates in the 1978 general election.
At the age of 33, married with two children, Eliane Cariou stood for the movement in Pau, the capital of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques region.
After getting divorced in 1985, she returned to Paris where she published her first highly successful book, Du bon usage des mecs (Éditions Renaudot et Cie., 1990), a humorous-cum-sociological essay on the new male–female relationship fashioned by feminism.
A second book in the same vein, Du bon usage des nanas (Éditions du Rocher), followed in 1993. Settling in the Touraine some years later, she published Secouez-vous les filles! (Éditions Hors-Commerce, 1996) and Du bon usage des hommes (a new edition of her first book).
In 1999, the publishing house Hors-Commerce brought out La cuisine séduction, a book of recipes combining the culinary with the seductive, co-authored by Cariou with chef and friend Chantal Malot.
In 2000 she published her first novel, La fille de Dieu (Éditions Hors-Commerce), an allegorical tale where Christ takes female form and is transposed to the modern day.
Having just finished On est une bande de jeunes. Les baby-boomers n'ont pas dit leur dernier mot, a scathing essay on the love life of today’s over-50s, Eliane Cariou is putting the final touches to her latest novel describing the trials and tribulations of a young woman grappling with the professional, family, emotional and even identity-related insecurities of the modern-day world.
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