On the morning of 16 November 1980, the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser burst out of his university apartment into the courtyard of the Ecole Normale screaming that he had killed his wife. Spared trial on grounds of mental illness, he lived out the rest of his lief in clinics until his death in 1990. This is his autobiography. In it Althusser, one of the most influential French thinkers of the sixties and seventies, admits to his fears of exposure as an intellectual fraud and analyzes his fraught, unconventional relationship with his wife Helene and reveals a history of severe identity crises and mental illness.