Today, Catherine Millet is best known simply as Catherine M, the Parisian nymphomaniac who made bookish types frisky with her 2001 memoir, The Sexual Life of Catherine M. But for three decades she was known only to the French chattering classes as a respected art critic and curator. Her matronly dress sense and dumpy build betrayed none of her dissolute instincts. 'As a child,' reads the memoir's opening line, 'I thought about numbers a great deal.' And three pages later, Millet is recounting her first experience of group sex - aged 18, just weeks after losing her virginity. Though reticent in everyday interactions, she gained confidence through being the girl who never said no. She didn't flirt but was always available to men, regardless of their age, shape or how many she had already serviced in one night. Of all her sexual partners, which must number in the thousands, Millet remembers only 49 names. For every orgy in a chic apartment, there was sex in railway stations, tractor-trailers and cemeteries, in the stands of sports stadiums, on park benches and on car bonnets. But Millet - now 60, and with her swinging lifestyle long behind her - protests that there was nothing unusual about her experiences. 'There are millions of people in the world with the same sort of sexual practices,' she says. To foreign observers, the book was a typically Gallic mixture of po-faced philosophy and outr? sex from a tradition that produced the Marquis de Sade, George Bataille and Pauline Reage's Story of O. Gay novelist Edmund White praised it as 'one of the most explicit books about sex ever written by a woman'. But writing in Liberation newspaper, late philosopher Jean Baudrillard carped: 'If one lifts one's skirt, it is to show one's self, not to show oneself naked like the truth.' The sexual autobiography was translated into nearly 40 languages and sold 400,000 copies in France alone. Since then, two of Millet's books on art have appeared in English - Contemporary Art in France in 2006 and, now, Dali and Me, which focuses on the surrealist painter's little-known essays and autobiographical writings. Born in Catalonia, Spain, Salvador Dali lived in Paris for much of his adult life and mostly wrote in French. 'Dali is still a taboo subject in France,' Millet says. 'French critics are attached to the notion of the cursed artist like Vincent van Gogh and don't like successful artists.' Dali's embrace of the fascist General Franco also taints his reputation, but Millet dismisses it as 'just another provocation'. Bisexual Dali was a trenchant critic of repression and Millet considers him history's first painter of masturbation and buttocks. She pays particular attention to two of his paintings, The Great Masturbator (1929) and Young Virgin Auto-Sodomised by the Horns of Her Own Chastity (1954). Dali was fascinated yet repulsed by sexuality and mostly abstained from carnal knowledge - hardly Millet's itinerary. Yet as the title suggests, Dali and Me is a personal response to Dali's work, with Millet digressing liberally into her own life. 'Our first contact with a work is always subjective - a dimension which art critics usually stifle to analyse the work on a more rational level. I believe it can paradoxically contribute to an objective understanding.' Her interest in Dali crystallised 10 years ago as she worked on a study of faeces in contemporary art. 'For Freud and Dali, who was a Freudian, excrement is the symbolic equivalent of gold,' she says. 'It's the reminder of our material condition - a representation of our destiny.' In autobiographical works such as The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942), Dali detailed the state of his body while writing - the contents of his stomach, the way he was dressed, or the position of his body. 'A thought is necessarily produced by a body,' explains Millet. 'The states of our body determine our thoughts.' In the prologue to Diary of a Genius (1964), Dali asserts that his book 'will prove that the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion, his ecstasies, his nails, his cold, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind'. But for Millet, his journals prove the contrary: 'When the TV cameras and the public were far away Dali had a very simple lifestyle.' Dali refused to see the creation of his art as more important than his daily errands. For Millet, as much can be learned about great figures from the banal parts of their lives as from social and intellectual aspects. The painter who once drove to a lecture in a Rolls-Royce crammed with cauliflowers was a master at staging his public persona. He became famous at the beginning of the media era and recognised before Andy Warhol the importance of being photographed. Hardly surprising then that Millet felt her experience of celebrity after The Sexual Life enabled her to understand Dali better. She knows about using photographs for publicity: her husband, novelist Jacques Henric, published a book of nude photographs of his wife simultaneously with her memoir, fuelling the succ?s de scandale. The two have been together for 25 years and married for 18. To the question of why a libertine might crave the conventional stamp of marriage, she retorts: 'Why should marriage, which is a consensual judicial act between two people, prevent their freedom?' In France, the memoir was a throwback in a climate where Michel Houellebecq's bleak novels about society's sexual excesses reflected a backlash against the liberated mores of 1968. 'The sexual freedom of one generation is an inhibiting factor for the following generation,' Millet says. 'That's why absolute and universal sexual freedom is a utopia.' She makes no apologies in The Sexual Life for her lifestyle. Nor is the book exactly a call for sexual liberation: in her matter-of-fact prose, Millet's experiences seem joyless and numbingly repetitive. 'It is a book written with some distance,' Millet concedes, stressing she sought 'neither to move nor shock readers'. Millet's emotional life is mostly absent from her memoir, though she hints at some early traumas in her petit bourgeois childhood. Her parents disliked each other and had affairs. Her brother died in a car accident when she was a teenager, leaving her alone to care for her chronically depressed mother, who finally took her own life. Aged 23, Millet entered psychoanalysis, but it was through professional recognition that she overcame her social awkwardness. 'I didn't need to assert myself as much through sexuality,' she says. She continues to edit Art Press, a review of contemporary art that she co-founded in 1972. In France, Millet is challenging Left Bank sensibilities again with her new memoir, Jour de Souffrance (Day of Suffering), in which she recounts the jealousy she experienced on discovering that Henric was being unfaithful. After learning of Henric's infidelity, Millet was besieged by thoughts of him with his lovers, at once aroused and tormented. What anguished Millet most was that she felt no legitimate reason to be angry with her husband, given her promiscuity in the first years of their marriage. But her sexual morality remains unchanged. 'Jealousy is an impulse,' she says. 'Perfect sexual freedom - a libertarian morality - rids one of all jealousy.' Millet barely mentions her jealousy in The Sexual Life, because she feared that writing about it would give the impression that she was being punished from on high for her transgressions. Now that we know she played down her angst, how much was that book a fantasy or elaborate Daliesque pose? 'I forced myself to avoid the traps that our subconscious places in our memories, especially when it concerns sexuality.' But she adds: 'Who can claim completely to master the subconscious? By definition, it is impossible.' Writer's notes Name: Catherine Millet Age: 60 Born: Paris Lives: Paris Family: married to Jacques Henric, a writer and photographer Genres: memoir; art criticism Latest book in English: Dali and Me Current project: a book of interviews in which Millet discusses the history of Art Press magazine Other books in English: The Sexual Life of Catherine M (2001); Contemporary Art in France (2006) Other jobs: editor of Art Press What the papers said about The Sexual Life of Catherine M: '... anything as puny as the idea of love, much less the pressure to connect with another human being, is nowhere in evidence; Millet is so turned in on her own 'vast plain of ... desire' as to suggest a kind of emotional autism' - The New York Times '... it is Millet's detachment that makes this book a fascinating document, one that resides on its own continent of perception, given its vast distance from gratification-centred or politically loaded sex writing' - The National Post (Canada)