Guibert was 22 when his first novel was published. He had just taken a job with the cultural service of the prestigious Parisian daily paper Le Monde, where he was responsible for reporting on photography. Writing and photography were in fact his life-long passions.

But it was with his seventeenth work, the novel À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie (To the Friend Who Didn't Rescue My Life, 1990), in which he gives an account of his experience of AIDS, that he both found his touch as a writer and finally attracted public attention and critical acclaim.

The success of this work initially owed something to the fact that in it Guibert gave away the "inside story" about the death of his friend Michel Foucault. By late 1994, over 357,000 copies of the two French editions alone had been sold and it has been translated into 17 languages.