Santiago Amigorena, born on February 15, 1962, in Buenos Aires, is an Argentine film director, screenwriter, producer, and writer, naturalized French.

In 1997, Santiago Amigorena met Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, who published his first novel Une enfance laconique with P.O.L. editions.

This book inaugurated an ambitious literary project begun more than twenty-five years earlier: the construction of an autobiography that would merge with all of his works, forming a "monster text" destined to entirely cover his life. The goal is to progressively exhaust autobiographical material in order to abolish the very need to write, that is, to distance oneself from existence.

This project unfolds in six parts, each covering six years of the narrator's life.

The first part, Une enfance laconique (1998), includes two chapters: Le Premier Cauchemar (The First Nightmare), which recounts the narrator's life up to a night in the summer of 1963 when darkness began to frighten him, and La Première Lettre (The First Letter), which concludes in 1968 when he learns to write.

The second part, Une jeunesse aphone (A Voiceless Youth), also consists of two chapters: Le Premier Exil (The First Exile) (2021) and Les Premiers Arrangements (The First Arrangements) (2000), in which the narrator discovers politics and friendship as its noblest form.

The third part, Une adolescence taciturne (A Taciturn Adolescence), brings together Le Second Exil (The Second Exile) (2002), where the narrator experiences the pain of being separated from his mother tongue, and Les Premières Fois (The First Times) (2016), a vast fresco of adolescence that concludes with his first romantic experience.