http://www.independent.ie- Laura D doesn’t conform to any of the stereotypes in my bank of prostitute ages images — although, granted, that bank is filled with happy hookers, glacial belles de jour and tragic victims.

With her clear complexion and scrubbed face, the French girl munching biscuits on a sofa next to me in her Paris publisher’s office looks even younger than her 20 years. She is olive-skinned, dark-haired, dark-eyed (her father’s family came from Spain) and dressed casually in jeans and a loose top. She looks like a lot of teenagers. The only faintly distinguishing mark is the tiniest piercing I have ever seen, just below one eye. It looks like a teardrop.

A year ago, Laura — not her real name — wrote a book about the year she spent part-timing as a prostitute in a town that she calls “V”. It is the town where she had lived all her life with her father, a factory worker, and her mother, a nurse (those are not their true occupations, either, though both of them have similarly respectable, low-paid jobs in real life).

Anonymity is so crucial to Laura’s equilibrium that at first she contacted her publishers only by e-mail, never face to face. She is fiercely keen to protect the identity of all concerned — and not surprisingly. Her book, titled Mes Chères Études (retitled Scandalous for its British imprint), caused a minor scandal in France and will doubtless cause a bigger one when it is turned into the inevitable film — because Laura was, and still is, a student.

In France, nearly 40,000 students of both sexes turn to prostitution to make ends meet, according to the book’s appendix.

This seems an extraordinary statistic, given the generous French welfare system. It is also a number that, for obvious reasons, is difficult to corroborate. However, it does seem that when it comes to students French welfare is something of a myth, which is why Laura says that she wrote the book.

“I wanted to bring something into the open that is still brushed under the carpet in France, and make people understand that there are so many people like me caught up in this,” she says.

“When the book came out in France a lot of people said that it was my choice, but at the time it didn’t feel like a choice.”

OK. Pause there. Before I met Laura, I felt as cynical as you may do reading this.

Surely there is some sort of grant system in France? Apparently not one that is easy to tap into if your family is low-income but self-supporting. Loans, then? These have to be paid back almost immediately, unlike the long-term arrangements in the Ireland. Couldn’t she have lived at home and saved money that way?

Her parents’ home was 35km from the university, far short of the 250km that would have ensured some kind of living allowance, and, by her account, transport to the city is patchy and expensive.

So, barely weeks into her Spanish and Italian course, Laura, living with a boyfriend who is treated unsympathetically, although he initially paid the rent and bills (“I was angry when I wrote it,” she says. “I was a bit severe”), was running into financial difficulties — not just sick of pasta, she corrects me, but sick of not being able to eat.

Although French bureaucracy makes it harder for students to find casual work there than in some other EU countries, Laura had a part-time telemarketing job that paid her €600 a month, but attending university classes meant she couldn’t always fulfil the 27 hours a week demanded in her contract. She says her parents couldn’t afford to help.

Bills mounted. Boyfriend problems simmered: he asked her to pay half the rent, although she says his parents were well off.

He seems to have been spectacularly immune to the financial plight of his girlfriend, even though she was losing weight rapidly. It was when an official at the university welfare centre pointed her towards a soup kitchen that something snapped.

“I really didn’t feel that it was an appropriate suggestion,” she says. “I had no money but I was a student, not an itinerant.”

Shortly afterwards, while skimming the hinterlands of the internet one evening, she came across a small “for adults only” advertisement. “But who were they kidding?” she says. “Anyone could click on.”

It all seemed to happen at once, she says. “Perhaps it was the threats from my bank… everything just accumulated.” She clicked on the internet advert and found herself instantly in a world of euphemistic classified ads in which the same predictable words recurred: young girl, massage, intimacy, meet up. Days later she was turning her first trick.

OK. Pause again. Wouldn’t escort work have been less drastic? “It’s one and the same thing,” she explains patiently. “That’s the big hypocrisy. One just sounds nicer than the other.”

In the year that Laura worked as a prostitute, she acquired 10 regular clients. One, a 60-year-old called Joe, returned regularly. He was her first client, and no sex took place on their first meeting. He wanted to talk, to gaze on her undernourished young body and play mind games. None of the men who came to see her was blatantly cruel, although Joe’s predilections strayed into borderline sadism. She seems to have despised them all, though.

Did none of them elicit sympathy? “Yes. Some of them were clearly unhappy. But I didn’t feel sympathetic when I wrote the book and I wasn’t exactly super-friendly at the time when I was dealing with them.”

She never reveals what any of the men were seeking from these joyless transactions, other than the obvious. She seems to have been so passive through every encounter that I found myself wondering whether she could be overstating her weary indifference to cover up something else.

“Like a fantasy, you mean?” Her almond eyes widen slightly. “Definitely not. But that’s the male fantasy, isn’t it? That women adore being prostitutes. There are so many cliches. I’m sure that a lot of men looked on me as a sort of Lolita.”

Actually I didn’t mean that she was living out some kind of fantasy, but that perhaps she was addicted to the risk or the adrenaline. She shakes her head. “Only addicted to paying the bills, but never to prostitution. Every time was horrible.”

Car parks, meagre little hotel rooms — these became the backdrop to Laura’s secret life, and the book manages not to endow them with any glamour, seedy or otherwise.

Laura’s experiences are relentlessly depressing, dingy and, as she acknowledges, dangerous: “Even more than other prostitutes, student prostitutes place themselves at risk because the secretive nature of what they do means that they never alert anyone to their whereabouts.”

“I have images from that time that I will have to live with every day,” says Laura. “That’s why I’m bitter.”

It is society with which she feels most angry, and it is when she talks about society that Laura sounds most like the student she still is (she graduates this year). While she acknowledges that not everyone in poverty makes the choice that she did, she sees herself as a victim.

This is one aspect of her negotiations that puzzles me, frankly, along with her decision to lower her rates. As a pretty 18-year-old, surely she could have charged a fortune rather than the €100 or so that she earned?

“I didn’t think about it that way,” she says simply. “I was just scraping by. I went with a client when I needed the money.”

Despite her claim not to have been naive, even now she doesn’t come across as worldly. Throughout the interview she analyses, considers, but doesn’t seem to connect with her emotions. When I ask whether she feels that her experiences have left her wise beyond her years, particularly where men are concerned, she hesitates.

“Well, I know a lot of things about them but I don’t know if that’s wisdom,” she says.

The men in her book are drawn so sketchily that it’s not easy for the reader to understand or engage with them — but then, the impression that we glean of Laura herself is sketchy, perhaps a reflection of the author’s cauterised emotions.

She leaves the skinflint boyfriend and eventually meets a more sympathetic man called Olivier, who tolerates her prostitution. Yet despite telling him all her woes, and moving in with him for a time, she doesn’t even ask about his job. “I had to listen to my clients’ problems,” she says. “I think at that point I just couldn’t take on any more.”

Matters came to a head one day when she was waiting to meet a new client and bumped into her parents and their friends in the town square. Filled with self-disgust, she fled to Paris, where she has remained while finishing her studies.

Like so much in her story, this decision seems odd: why, in the middle of a personal financial meltdown, would she move to the most expensive city in France? She shrugs and explains that she felt the need to get as far away from V as possible, to somewhere anonymous.

Once in Paris, she found work as a waitress — although the pay is no better than her telemarketing job. “I had realised how destructive the prostitution had been for me,” she explains.

Two years after she wrote it, Mes Chères Études has been translated into 11 languages. With the film in the pipeline, Laura is not rich but can support herself. She thinks she will do a master’s degree in IT.

She has told no one what she did — not even the man with whom she is currently (and seemingly seriously) involved.

“It’s not just the shame,” she says. “I needed to have friends and family where I felt I could escape. If they had known what I was doing, there would have been no respite.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to talk about this to the people who know me and love me,” she says. “That’s part of the pain I have to learn to live with. People ask me whether there is anything positive that I can take out of this. There really isn’t.”