Jean Genet's seminal Our Lady Of The Flowers (1943) is generally considered to be his finest fictional work. The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then-present history. Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one over which he had total control. The imprisoned narrator "Jean," who may or may not be identical with the author, masturbates regularly; like a perpetual motion machine, his fantasies fuel his writing and his writing spurs on his fantasies in turn. Nothing illustrates this more than the brief scene in which self-sustaining "Jean" describes his Tiamat.... Legs thrown over shoulders, "Jean" is not only the serpent that eats its tail but becomes a small, circular, self-imbibing universe all his own. A motto attributed to the alchemists could be the narrator's own: "Every man his own wife."