Abstract
In many of Amélie Nothomb's autofictional novels, the final step toward regaining the jouissance of her lost childhood is the development of the character Amélie-the-writer. Nothomb depicts in multiple accounts her character Amélie's coming to writing, a process that mirrors her nostalgia for the tube-like identity of her prelinguistic self and her perceived divinity during her childhood in Japan, as well as her desire to return to the womb. This article considers first the characteristics that are associated with Amélie's childhood, her sense of a divine and mythic self, secondly the various scenes in Nothomb's autofictional novels in which the narrator Amélie experiences a moment of death and rebirth through violence at sea, and, finally, how the character Amélie achieves, to some extent, the desired return to the ideal of childhood through the creation of a fictional self in her writing.