Nicknamed 'Kiki', she was the youngest child of bourgeois parents – her father a company director, and her mother the daughter of landowners.

The novel concerns the life of a pleasure-driven 17-year-old named Cécile and her relationship with her boyfriend and her widowed playboy father.

[9] Though never his disciple, in a chapter titled “Love Letter to Jean-Paul Sartre” in her memoir, With Fondest Regards, Sagan recounts how important the philosopher’s writings were to her when she was young.

In retaliation, the extreme right-wing terrorist organization OAS planted a bomb at her parents' home on August 23, 1961, but the explosion caused only material damage.

On 13 March 1958, she married her first husband, Guy Schoeller, an editor with Hachette, who was 20 years older than Sagan.

On 14 April 1957, while driving her Aston Martin sports car at speed, she was involved in an accident that left her in a coma for some time.

During her recovery she became dependent on the pain medication she was prescribed, a topic she wrote about in her nonfiction work, Toxique.

In 2002, she was unable to appear at a trial in which she was convicted of tax fraud in a case involving the former French President François Mitterrand and she received a suspended sentence.

In his memorial statement, the French President Jacques Chirac said: "With her death, France loses one of its most brilliant and sensitive writers – an eminent figure of our literary life."

She wrote her own obituary for the Dictionary of Authors compiled by Jérôme Garcin: "Appeared in 1954 with a slender novel, Bonjour tristesse, which created a scandal worldwide.