Sophie Calle’s True Stories runs on a fixed, almost severe rhythm: a short text, a photograph, another text, another photograph. Few of the stories take more than a page. Out of that alternation Calle builds something close to an autobiography — fragmentary, unsentimental, assembled rather than confessed, in the manner her work has long favoured.

The book first appeared in French in 1994 and has been reissued in expanded form several times since; this Actes Sud hardcover is a new edition of 152 pages, with three stories added. Its three parts move differently. The first holds reflections on objects — a shoe, a postcard, the breasts. The second, “The Husband,” returns to episodes from Calle’s first marriage. The third gathers autobiographical recollections at large.

Throughout, Calle writes as author, narrator and photographer. The images are not decorations appended to a memoir; they are the other half of each entry, and the book’s real subject is the way a photograph and a remembered object can hold a life in place. Childhood, marriage, sex and death arrive in sentences chosen with care, and the tone shifts without warning from the humorous to the cruel.

For a collector, the appeal lies in the object and the arrangement rather than any claimed rarity. At roughly 20 by 11 centimetres, the volume is deliberately small — a size that keeps text and image in one-to-one exchange and makes the reading feel sequential, like turning through an index of someone’s life. Because the book has been reshaped across editions, each printing is a particular state of a mutable text, and this one carries stories earlier versions did not.

Thirty years on from its first appearance, True Stories remains the closest thing Calle has made to an autobiography. Owning the current edition is a matter of knowing precisely what is inside it.