In ‘The Autobiographer as Torero’, Michel Leiris discusses the reasons he felt moved to write Manhood as ‘the negation of a novel’; it is not to be anything but a condensation of ‘facts and images’ in their unpolished rawness. He continues:

Already a trail had been blazed for me in this direction by André Breton’s Nadja, but I dreamed above all of making my own that project Baudelaire was inspired to undertake after reading a passage in Poe’s Marginalia: to lay bare one’s heart, to write that book about oneself in which the concern for sincerity would be carried to such lengths that, under the author’s sentences, ‘the paper would shrivel and flare at each touch of his fiery pen’.