As an international Guadeloupian female author, Maryse Condé negotiates the categories of writer, critic and academic with an acute awareness of the conditions of reception of her work. Although nominally a ‘Guadeloupian writer’, Condé's reputation as ‘an important writer’ has largely been consolidated in the United States and in France where she has been awarded a number of literary prizes. One of the distinguishing – and also critically overlooked – features of Condé's work has been the significant number of interviews that she has given during this period in a variety of media in both the United States and France. In these interviews, Condé's numerous interviewers have all revealed a more or less pronounced concern with engaging her in a process of reflection on the influence of her own life experiences on her fiction. If Condé has typically submitted willingly and, arguably, with some relish, to this line of questioning, she has also used her interventions in these interviews (as well as her literary and critical writings) to unsettle the assumption that her fiction is a transparent reflection of her life. This process of questioning has been anchored in a marked, and ongoing, discussion of the conditions of reception faced by her work and an appeal to the freedom of ‘literature’ and the ‘author’. Through a comparative analysis of two sets of published interviews conducted with Condé between 1991 and 2004, this chapter examines the uses to which she puts her varied and often ambiguous representations of ‘the personal’, ‘the field of reception’, ‘literature’ and ‘the author’.