In her best-selling first volume of autobiography, La Bâtarde (1964), Violette Leduc's textual avatar attempts to take on a number of diverse personae, but is consistently revealed to be an imperfect performer of the roles she seeks to appropriate. During the Occupation, however, she assumes two new and transgressive identities: those of writer and black-marketeer. This article asks why the roles of trafiquante and écrivaine are intimately linked in La Bâtarde, discussing what it is about these apparently dissimilar, even conflicting, enterprises that renders Leduc's Occupation narrative a rare success story.