La Maison

If I don't talk about these women, no one will ...

In this bold and intimate semi-autobiographical novel, La Maison, Emma Becker transports the reader behind the closed doors of a Berlin brothel, where she worked for two years not only to earn a living, but to immerse herself in a world she wanted to understand - and to write about with unflinching honesty. What emerges is a deeply personal, unsentimental, and often surprising account of life inside the brothel, where Becker explores not just the physical aspects of sex work, but the emotional, psychological, and social complexities that shape it.

With frankness and literary insight, she recounts her encounters with clients, her growing self-awareness, and, most poignantly, the friendships and solidarity she finds among the other women who work there. Far from reducing sex work to cliché or voyeurism, Becker gives space to the quiet routines, shared laughter, private pain, and hard-won dignity of a profession often misunderstood and rarely written about from the inside.

Part memoir, part sociological study, and wholly literary, La Maison challenges preconceptions about sex, agency, and femininity, offering a provocative and compassionate exploration of what it means to inhabit multiple identities—as worker, writer, woman, and witness.

About the Author

Emma Becker gained recognition with her debut novel Monsieur (2011), followed by Alice (2015). In 2013, she moved to Berlin, where she worked in a brothel for two years to research her semi-autobiographical novel La Maison (2019), which won the Prix France Culture-Télérama. After several years in Berlin, she relocated to the south of France in 2021, where she continues to write.