Perhaps the place to start when thinking about the development of French autobiography since the beginning of the twentieth century is with a work published early on in the century which is not usually considered to belong to the literary genre of autobiography at all, despite possessing certain structural features that suggest otherwise. Marcel Proust's mammoth À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) is a multi-volume work taking the form of a first-person narrative. It traces in writing the lengthy, intricate voyage which the narrator, eventually named as Marcel, makes as he embarks upon a journey into his recollections of the past, prompted by the experience of re-living a taste sensation from his childhood as he eats a small cake called a madeleine. Although not considered an autobiography, despite a clear autobiographical dimension, Proust's work showcases many of the recurrent issues and themes of modern French autobiography. Grappling with the nature of perception, memory and remembering, self-consciously attentive to writing as an act of representation, blurring the boundary between fiction and autobiography, À la recherche alerts us to a number of persistent and knotty conundrums that would beset French literary autobiographers writing later in the twentieth century, and indeed into the twenty-first. The purpose of this chapter is to give an account of those recurrent preoccupations which come to characterise the genre of autobiography, and of the evolution autobiography has undergone since Proust's time.